


The Rags of Time

by JohnAmendAll



Series: Holiday Jobs [6]
Category: Doctor Who (1963)
Genre: Community: heroinebigbang, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-27
Updated: 2016-07-27
Packaged: 2018-07-27 03:46:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 25
Words: 40,947
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7602136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JohnAmendAll/pseuds/JohnAmendAll
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On 21 June, the space vessel <i>Butterfly</i> was lost with all hands. Responsibility for the disaster appears to rest with one Zoë Heriot, but what really happened in the days and months leading up to the tragedy?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue: 21 June

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Heroine Big Bang, round 4. Cover artwork is by [erinm_4600](http://erinm-4600.livejournal.com/).

  
[](http://s222.photobucket.com/user/gateship01/media/hbb/hbbR4_01.jpg.html)  
  


> _Corpus omne perseverare in statu suo quiescendi vel movendi uniformiter in directum, nisi quatenus a viribus impressis cogitur statum illum mutare.  
>  [Every body continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it.]_  
>    — Newton's First Law (tr. Motte) 

_The airlock opened, and Agent Gomez stepped into the control room of the space vessel_ Unyielding Judgement. 

_"Situation?" he asked._

_"Unchanged," Agent Borodin replied._

_Gomez nodded. "Stand down. I'll take over."_

_As Borodin left to take some well-earned rest, Gomez turned to the ship's captain._

_"If they make a break for it, can we catch them?" he asked._

_Captain Lupita Orlov considered the question. "We can outmanoeuvre them, out-accelerate them and outgun them. Projections show a maximum engagement time of ninety minutes. Of course, any such activity would break our cover."_

_"Quite. Let's remain innocuous for now. Let them make the first move."_

_It had long been known that stealth in space — concealing a spacecraft or probe from prying eyes — was difficult, bordering on impossible. The traffic radars scattered through the Solar System were designed to track objects large enough to be a hazard to navigation, and that would certainly include a spaceship. Even without those, the heat radiation from its life support systems — or its engines, the first time it needed to alter its course — would be unmistakeable._

_For this reason, the_ Unyielding Judgement _, in the guise of the freighter_ Watersmeet _, had registered its routine cargo flight from Earth to Station Gamma-3, in orbit around Neptune, with all the relevant authorities. And since it was thus registered, it attracted only the most cursory attention on its journey, its humdrum identity and purpose making it far less visible than any attempt to conceal its thermal signature or obscure it from radar._

_Gomez glanced at the monitor by his elbow. It was filled by the looming presence of Neptune, a dark blue sphere with a few pale streaks, and the dark blots of moon-sized storms. One of them, near the north pole, almost resembled an eye peering up from the globe. Station Gamma-3 was a tiny dot against the planet, hardly noticeable if not for the tracking glyphs surrounding it._

_"Sir." Lieutenant Darius, tactical officer, had spoken. "Launch detected."_

_At the same moment, there had been a brief flare of light from the dot that was Gamma-3. A second set of tracking glyphs glowed into life, moving slowly away from the first._

_"It is them?" Captain Orlov asked. "Not a decoy?"_

_"Mass and acceleration consistent with_ Butterfly _. Transponder code match. Sir, departure profile is consistent with full emergency acceleration."_

_"So they do know we're here. Or suspect it." Gomez checked his seatbelt was properly fastened. "No point in hiding, then. Intercept course."_

_"Full power," Orlov said. "Intercept in eighty-four minutes."_

_A low, menacing hum ran through the_ Unyielding Judgement _. The tracking glyphs on its monitors were joined by new data: range to target, intercept time, weapons status._

_Two minutes later, a brief flicker ran across the bridge. Lights and screens winked out, then relit. The hum of the engines momentarily faltered._

_"What was that?" Gomez asked._

_"Checking." Darius tapped at a computer. "Electromagnetic pulse, apparently centred on_ Butterfly _."_

_Orlov was hurriedly paging through screens of information on her own console. "Consistent with catastrophic reactor failure."_

_Sharp, clear schematics of the_ Butterfly _appeared on the screens, overlaid with hazy patches indicating the likely areas of damage._

_"Their course has changed," Darius said sharply. "Contra-orbital thrust... their course will intersect Neptune's atmosphere. Sir, is this a distress situation?"_

_"It is." Gomez was gripping the arms of his chair. "Can we get to that ship before it burns up?"_

_"Possibly," Orlov said. "But it's not sufficient to get to it: we need to grapple and decelerate it before it's destroyed. A drone fighter would stand a better chance."_

_"Then launch one. Launch both."_

_A shudder ran through the ship. Two sleek silver tubes were briefly visible on the screen, quickly shrinking to points of light._

_"Drones away," Darius said. He turned back to his console. "We have further data on the_ Butterfly _'s course."_

_"Tell me," Gomez snapped._

_"_ Butterfly _'s course will intersect Neptunian atmosphere in T plus seventy-four minutes. It will be destroyed no later than T plus seventy-seven minutes. Earliest possible drone intercept..." He swallowed. "Earliest possible drone intercept is at T plus eighty-five minutes."_

_"If I authorise the use of war emergency power ratings on the drones?" Gomez demanded._

_"T plus eighty-one minutes."_

_"Four minutes too late," Orlov said. "Before the drones get anywhere near her,_ Butterfly _will be molten slag. And when they do, they'll be scrap metal too."_

_Gomez, his face still maintaining an expression of rigid calm, brought his fist down on the arm of his chair, hard enough to crack it. "The little_ snake _!" he growled._

_"Sir?" Orlov asked._

_"This isn't an accident. It's sabotage. She deliberately programmed the reactor to blow them out of orbit. Make sure we couldn't get our hands on them. Look at your own figures! Seventy-seven minutes versus eighty-five. A ten percent safety margin." He swallowed, trying to regain his self-control. "Keep the drones with them, for as long as you can. Check she really was on board the ship, not hiding on the station."_

_"Check who was on the ship, sir?" Darius asked._

_Gomez shot a cold glare at him. "The Heriot girl, of course." He looked back at the radar image of the doomed ship. "There's no way she can escape, but I want to be completely certain."_


	2. Sleeping Beauty

> _The purpose of a Space Accident Investigation Branch (SAIB) investigation is to improve spacecraft safety by preventing future accidents or by mitigating their consequences. It is not the purpose of such an investigation to establish blame or liability._  
>    — Standard opening text of SAIB reports, first used in 2062 

_It was what they called a 'dead room'. It might have been deep underground, or on the Moon, or in a secure government compound, or perhaps just tucked away into some unobtrusive corner of a block of flats. Without any windows or doors, there was no way to tell. The only way in and out was to use the teleporter that occupied one corner of the room — and that would only respond to commands by authorised users. Possibly an expert technician might have been able to take control of the device, but Alison Swift certainly didn't fall into that category._

_She was sure she'd entered the right teleport code, but no doubt the Government — or the Shadow Government — or the World Security Agency — had been keeping tabs on her and diverted her to this place. It was furnished as a comfortable, tidy room with indirect lighting, a well-appointed bed, soft chairs and low tables, but it was still nothing more than a prison cell. She'd had ample opportunity to muse on that, during the hours since she'd arrived with only her thoughts for company. They hadn't been pleasant thoughts. She felt rather as if she'd been the sort of girl who'd obsessed over unicorns, who had posters of unicorns on her wall and unicorn images on her screensaver... and they'd turned out to be real, ferocious creatures with needle-sharp horns on their heads, that had killed two of her closest friends in front of her._

_Presently, the quiet hum of the T-Mat intruded on her thoughts. She didn't rise from her seat, as two people took their places opposite her. They were both soldiers, dressed in the same dark green uniform with black buttons._

_"Ms Alison Swift?" said the older-looking one._

_Alison was still staring fixedly at her feet. "You know who I am."_

_"We'd still like you to confirm it for the record."_

_"All right. Yes, I'm Alison Swift."_

_"Good. I'm Colonel Richard Stanley, and this is Major Amadu Stewart."_

_The Major took up the story. "We are here today to investigate the events surrounding the loss of the space vessel_ Butterfly _."_

_Alison had guessed as much, but the Major's calm, dispassionate description of the greatest tragedy in her life to date caused something to snap within her._

_"What's the point?" she asked bitterly. "You can't bring it back. You can't bring any of them back!"_

_"Unfortunately true. Nevertheless it's our duty to learn what lessons we can from the incident. And we believe you can help us."_

_"But I was at the inquiry. I told them everything I knew."_

_The Major gave her a sympathetic look. "Possibly. But we require absolute confirmation."_

_"You mean a psi-probe." Alison might have felt her heart sink, except that from her perspective it had been bumping along at ground level for days. "It'll hurt, won't it?"_

_"That's the state of the art, I'm afraid. We propose to verify the course of events against your recollection and Lily Carson's diary — we can't, of course, take a statement from Ms Carson herself. Now, for your own safety, it'll be necessary to restrain you."_

_Alison didn't try to run. As she knew all too well, there was nowhere she could run to._

⁂

**Extract from Lily Carson's diary: Saturday 13 February**

Zoë rang me early this morning — early enough that I knew it wasn't just another sporting expedition. 

"Are you busy?" she asked, just as usual. 

"No." 

"Good. Can you get hold of a trowel and meet us at the Castlethorpe public T-Mat in an hour's time? It might be a good idea to wear wellies." 

"No problem," I said, and we left it there. 

Writing this down, I've just realised she said 'us' rather than 'me'. I wonder who else she's bringing. Anyway, I don't think she'd call at this short notice if she'd just found another dangerous sport she wants us to try. Quite apart from asking me to bring a trowel; I'm nearly sure there isn't any such thing as extreme gardening. 

Anyway, I'd better finish writing this and see about getting a trowel. 

**Later:** It's nearly midnight. Zoë's just left. I ought to go to bed, but I need to write down everything that's happened while it's fresh in my mind. 

As instructed I bought a trowel, and headed off to Castlethorpe. Zoë was waiting outside the T-Mat booth, along with a gangly, freckled, redheaded girl who looked about eighteen — and nervous. Both of them were wearing old jumpsuits and boots, and were holding full-sized spades. Zoë's changed her hairdo since last time I saw her; she's ditched the Alice band and added purple streaks. It doesn't really do it for me. 

"Lily, I don't think you've met Alison," Zoë said. "Alison Swift — Lily Carson." 

We shook hands, and exchanged polite greetings. 

"Alison knows where we're going," Zoë explained. "Lead on." 

We set off. Castlethorpe isn't a particularly nice place; it looks as if it used to be big in the transport sector, and T-Mat has hit it hard. A lot of the streets have obvious gaps where buildings have been demolished, leaving patches of lush, neatly-trimmed grass that somehow look more out of place than the boarded-up factories and faded shops. Before long, I was starting to see the grassed-over areas as scars from an amputation. Then it began to drizzle, which didn't help. 

"I suppose I'd better start from the beginning," Alison said. "Has Zoë told you anything about me?" 

I shook my head, wondering if she was about to introduce herself as Zoë's new girlfriend. 

"Well," Alison continued. "I'm into..." She waved her hands, searching for the right term. "The unexplained. Strange happenings. That sort of thing." 

"Forteana," Zoë added helpfully. 

"Yes, that. That's how we met." 

"She keeps posting messages about inexplicable phenomena." Zoë couldn't resist a smile. "Then I explain them." 

"With you so far," I said. 

"I really specialise in fairy abductions," Alison said. "By the way, Zoë, I think I've got a new lead on the Ragged Man. You know the missing footage from the 2012 Olympics?" 

"Alison and her circle think that the official record of the 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony was faked," Zoë explained patiently. "The idea is that part of it was reshot later and inserted to replace something the Government didn't want people seeing. That's right, isn't it?" 

Alison nodded eagerly. "I think it was the Ragged Man. That's what they wanted to cover up. I found an account written by Penny—" 

"—Carter." Zoë finished the sentence for her. "You do know how unreliable she is?" 

"That was a smear job by the Establishment!" 

"Excuse me," I said. "Who is the Ragged Man, anyway?" 

"Well, that's not his real name," Alison said. "Fairies don't reveal their true names, you see. We call him the Ragged Man because there was an authentic sighting of him in the late 1990s and the girl who saw him—" 

Zoë cleared her throat, rather pointedly. "Has this got anything to do with what we're doing today?" 

"Everything's connected to everything else. Dirk Gently said that." 

"Actually, it was Lenin," Zoë said, sounding positively waspish. "Alison, would anything you have to tell us about this Ragged Man help us today in the slightest?" 

Alison looked uncomfortable, but eventually came up with "Probably not." 

"Then it's probably best for all of us if you stay on topic, isn't it?" 

I decided that I'd better intervene, before the discussion turned into an actual argument. "Where are we going, anyway?" 

"It's called Stoker's Farm," Alison said. "Out near the old motorway." 

"What's there?" 

"Zoë said I shouldn't say. She said she wanted to see it without preconceptions." 

Gradually, as we walked, the town gave way to a scruffy hinterland, with neglected-looking fields interrupted by the occasional house or industrial unit. A lot of them looked abandoned, too. After a while, we turned off down a side road; there was a rusty gate across it which looked as if it hadn't been opened in years, but which left enough room for pedestrians to walk around. Beyond the gate, moss and grass were encroaching on the surface of the roadway. On one side was a hedge running wild, and on the other side a ditch full of green slime. 

"I come for walks this way now and again," Alison said. 

It didn't look like anywhere I'd want to walk. Judging by Zoë's expression, she was of the same opinion. 

"Do I want to know why?" she said. 

Alison mumbled something I couldn't quite catch, but I got the general idea that she thought herself a poet, and roamed the verdant lanes in search of inspiration. 

"Does anyone else come here?" I asked. 

"I've seen people walking their dogs," Alison said. "That's about it." 

Ten more minutes' walk brought us to a gap in the hedge. We passed through this into a wilderness of scrub and brambles. A narrow path showed the route Alison had taken on her previous visit. We followed it; it was slow going, because we were continually getting caught on thorns. 

Some time after we'd lost sight of the road among the bushes, we arrived at the edge of a pit, about ten metres across at its widest and deep in proportion. Its sides were too steep to support much vegetation, though a few bushes had had a go here and there. The bottom was filled with a repellent mixture of mud, stagnant water, and what looked like the rusting remains of farm machinery. I'm sure there was the frame of an old-style bed in there, too — it looked as if it had been there for a couple of hundred years. Just visible at the far end, about a metre above water level, there was an outline in the side of the pit — just a shadow in the earth, but it was clearly the shadow of a person. 

"It's that shape," Alison said, pointing at the dark outline. "I know it wasn't there last month." 

"Maybe it was covered over and some of the ground's fallen away," Zoë suggested. She didn't sound very convinced; the sides of the pit looked to be made of hard, compacted earth, with no sign of recent movement. 

"I had a look at it, close up." Alison continued. "It's really hard to see when you get down there." 

Zoë sighed. "I suppose we'd better take a look, now we're here." 

We walked around to where the edges of the pit had the shallowest slope, half-climbed, half-slid down to water level, and picked our way through the mud to where the outline was. Close to, just as Alison said, it was barely visible — just a slight darkness in the soil. 

"Do you think there's a natural explanation?" I asked. 

Zoë was peering at the edge of the shape. "You could make the earth darker with some kind of dye, I suppose. But I don't see why anyone would." 

"Maybe we could try and dig it?" Alison asked eagerly. "See how far back it goes." 

"That's a good point. Dye probably wouldn't soak in too far." Zoë paused in thought. "It'd be a shame not to use these spades, after we went to the trouble of bringing them." 

It was a lot harder than digging in a garden. We didn't have anywhere firm to stand, meaning that each time we tried to do anything with a spade, we risked losing our footing and tumbling into the water. The earth was as compacted as it looked, almost impossible to get a spade or a trowel into, and then almost impossible to shift if you did. The rain had really come on by now, but it didn't make the earth any softer — it just made us wetter, and the footing more treacherous. 

After what felt like ages of digging, we'd managed to scrape away a few pathetic shovelfuls of earth. I was about ready to give up, when I pushed my trowel into the hole we were digging and it hit something hard, with a metallic sound. 

"There's something here," I said. 

The other two gathered round, and after a lot more time and trouble we managed to expose a hard, black surface, slightly curved. When I touched it, it felt metallic. 

"Do you think it's as big as the shadowed area?" Zoë said. "If it is, it would take us approximately three days to expose all of it." 

Alison looked as if her enthusiasm was finally wilting. "Maybe we ought to come back with better tools." 

"I agree," Zoë said. She wrenched her spade out of the earth, overbalanced, and staggered back against the side of the pit. Her free hand, flailing for balance, came into contact with the cold metal. 

There was a flare of yellow light. 

With a gasp, Zoë pulled her hand away, holding it as if something had burned her. For a moment, I could see her handprint on the metal surface, faintly glowing; then it faded. 

The earth shook, nearly sending Alison and me tumbling. Cracks started to appear in the side of the pit, radiating out from where we'd been digging. 

"Run!" Zoë shouted. 

We abandoned our tools and headed for the far side of the crater, as fast as we could, though running wasn't really an option in those conditions. By the time we got there, the side where we'd been digging was collapsing in a mini-landslide. From the collapsing earth a dark figure emerged. 

It was fairly clear that it was the same thing we'd been trying to dig out. It was human-sized or slightly bigger, and in human proportions too. It looked almost like an old-style knight in armour, but there was a round-edged look to its design that made it feel more modern than it ought to. Its head was either covered by a helmet, or else the helmet was part of the head; there were two curving protrusions on the top, like horns. Behind the visor at the front, I couldn't see a face, just the vague outline of a silver mask — or perhaps a skull. In one hand, the figure was carrying a battleaxe, which looked too rusty to cut anything, but heavy enough to crush someone's head. 

The figure looked around for a few seconds, then headed in our direction, its empty eyesockets fixed on us. 

We didn't need to be told twice, and started to scramble up out of the pit. The rain had rendered the steep banks almost frictionless; our first few attempts merely ended in us losing our footing and slipping back down again. In the end, I had to do most of it on all fours, and near the top it got so bad that I had to grab a nearby bush and drag myself out. Just as I was climbing to my feet, I heard a shriek, and looked round in time to see that Alison had slipped again, badly. She rolled helplessly back down into the crater, landing in the mud at the feet of the implacably approaching warrior.


	3. Persistence Hunting

> _This could be a very short friendship._  
>    — The Fourth Doctor, _Warriors' Gate_

_"Why didn't it kill you?" Major Stewart asked._

_Trapped and immobile in the mind-scan apparatus, electrodes pressed against her head from all sides, Alison at first didn't seem to understand the question. Her eyes remained closed for nearly a minute, before they slowly opened and met his._

_"It hurts," she said dully. "Make it stop."_

_"We'll stop when we've got the answers we need. You know we can't ask your friends. You're the only one left with the knowledge we require."_

_Alison didn't answer, but a single tear rolled down her cheek._

_"Why didn't it kill you?" Major Stewart repeated._

**Extract from Lily Carson's diary: Saturday 13 February**

Whatever the creature was, it walked straight past Alison without even breaking step, and up the side of the pit in our direction. It managed to keep its balance a lot better than Zoë or I had, too. 

"Alison, are you OK?" I called down. 

"It didn't touch me," she called back, struggling to her feet. "I'll try and get out somewhere else while it isn't looking." 

"OK." I backed away from the pit as the thing's head rose into view. "Why didn't it attack her?" 

"I've got a theory," Zoë said. "You walk round the pit that way, and I'll go this way. Let's see which one of us it follows." 

I walked round the side of the pit, to where Alison was scrambling up. I caught hold of her hand just in time to prevent her from slipping, and got her onto solid ground. She looked terrified almost out of her mind, and I think if I hadn't still been holding onto her she'd have made a bolt for it. 

"What is it?" she asked, staring across the pit. The creature, whatever it was, had reached the rim and was walking around it, in the same direction that Zoë was, and not paying us the slightest attention. Zoë seemed to be letting it get closer to her. 

"Don't you know? I thought you were the one who studied unknown phenomena." 

"Well, yes, but nothing like this..." Alison closed her eyes and swallowed. "Maybe it's some sort of golem." 

Over on the other side of the pit, the creature had almost reached Zoë. Moving with a horrible, mechanical rapidity, it swung its axe at her; with an equally swift reaction, she ducked and rolled, then put a healthy distance between it and herself. 

"I thought golems were made of clay?" I heard myself say, unable to tear my eyes away from what was happening. 

"Well, there are multiple legends..." Alison broke off. "Why's she waving at us?" 

I couldn't make out what Zoë's gestures meant either. In the end I had to resort to calling "I don't understand!" across the pit. 

"Get to the road!" Zoë called back. "I'll meet you there." 

We struggled back through the bushes to the abandoned road, and waited there for Zoë to catch up with us. It wasn't that much time before she showed up, though it seemed a lot longer. 

"You said you had a theory," I said, as she came up. "It looked as if you're the one it was chasing. Why?" 

Zoë made a gesture of dismissal. "We can deal with that later. And it's still following me. We need to keep walking." 

"Yes, but where?" 

"Along the road for now." 

"Then back to the T-Mat?" Alison suggested. "You could teleport to the Moon or something. It can't follow you there." 

"Leading it into a town would put innocent people at risk," Zoë said. "Alison, you take walks around here. Do you know a circular route about five kilometres long that we can get to from here without going through the town?" 

It took Alison a longish time to come up with a meaningful answer, but eventually she managed "Yes. Across the old motorway." 

"OK. Take us to a point on the loop." 

"This way," Alison said, gesturing to a side turning. 

We followed her. The path we were following looked like another abandoned road, but one where the surface had crumbled completely away, so it was just an uneven, muddy track between two ditches. 

"Can we have your theory now?" I asked Zoë. 

"It's simple enough. You and Alison touched the thing, and it didn't react. I did, and it activated. I suppose it locked onto me then, and it'll keep that lock... well, probably until it's killed me. Then I expect it'll lock onto someone else, and start all over again. Does anyone have any other ideas?" 

"You thought it was a golem, didn't you?" I said to Alison. 

"Golem. A clay figure animated by magic," Zoë said. "It doesn't look like clay." 

"It might be clay inside," Alison said. 

"That's true. If you put me in a suit of armour I wouldn't look as if I was made of meat." 

"And maybe that's why it didn't attack me. There's an account of golems in the Black Forest where if you were covered in mud they'd think you were one of their own." Alison gestured at her mud-caked jumpsuit. "Maybe that's why it didn't attack me." 

"That doesn't sound very bright," I said. 

"It happens a lot in golem legends. The unintended consequences of a literal-minded being following orders exactly." 

"There are plenty of similar stories about robots and misphrased instructions," Zoë said. "Probably a lot of Alison's golem legends were written after computers were invented." 

"They're from time immemorial!" Alison protested. 

"But you can't actually trace that Black Forest one earlier than the first decade of this century." 

"It's got the _feel_ of an old legend." 

"Well, I'll keep that idea in reserve," Zoë conceded. "If nothing else works, I'm willing to risk a mud bath." She looked back over her shoulder; I couldn't help following her gaze, and saw the familiar shape still plodding after us. "If the thing's using infrared to track me, that might block it." 

At this point, the path abruptly stopped at the top of a broad, obviously artificial cutting. There were steps cut in both sides, and the base of the cutting was grassed over. 

"I presume this was the motorway," Zoë said, as we followed Alison down the steps. "Are we near the start of the loop?" 

"Just on the other side." 

"OK. Alison, you'll have to stay with me to show me the route. Lily, I want you to go back to the T-Mat..." 

"And call You-Know-Who?" I suggested. 

"Don't anticipate, Lily. You go to my flat. Have you got a tablet or anything to take notes with?" 

I shook my head. "I only brought the trowel. That's all you said." 

"Talking of stupid robots following orders literally," Zoë said. "All right, you'll have to memorise the T-Mat coordinates and the passcode." 

She told me both, and made me repeat them back to her until she was certain I had them at my fingertips. 

"Right," she said. We'd crossed the motorway by then, and were on another abandoned road. There was a decaying greenhouse on the left, with most of the glass panels missing from its roof, and trees growing through the gaps. "Alison, are we on the loop now?" 

"Yes." 

"OK. Lily, teleport to the coordinates I've given you. They'll take you to a street near where I live. Go to Barar House, flat 13 and enter the passcode. The utility alcove's near the back. There's a toolkit under the sink. Bring the toolkit back here and wait for us. You've got an hour." 

"But I..." I began. 

Zoë glared at me. "Go!" 

I went.


	4. Warrior's Gait

> _Ben Battle was a soldier bold,_  
>  _And used to war's alarms:_  
>  _But a cannon-ball took off his legs,_  
>  _So he laid down his arms!_  
>    — Thomas Hood, _Faithless Nelly Gray_

**Extract from Lily Carson's diary: Saturday 13 February**

I hadn't been in Zoë's flat before. It barely looked inhabited. I'd thought it would be tidy — she's like that — but it was almost as if she didn't want to leave anything of herself there. No pictures, no personal items, and not so much as a cushion out of place. 

I hardly had time to look round the place, though. I found the alcove, and dug out the toolkit; it was a big box, easily a metre long, and heavy enough that I had to carry it in both arms. Once I'd secured it, I T-Matted back to Castlethorpe as fast as I could. I was back at the derelict greenhouse well within the hour, and then hung around nervously wondering what I'd do if Zoë didn't show up. 

Just when I'd lost all hope, I saw her and Alison appear round a corner. As they came closer I could see how cold, wet and exhausted they both looked. Alison was shivering in her mud-plastered jumpsuit, and Zoë didn't look much better off. And behind them, the black, armoured figure was still patiently plodding in pursuit. 

"You didn't have any trouble with the toolkit?" Zoë demanded. 

"No. It was just where you said." 

"Good." Zoë squared her shoulders. "You two, hold it for me while I work. We've still got to keep moving." 

We stumbled along the roadway, the two of us just in front of Zoë, holding the toolkit up between us. The surface wasn't that rough, but it still seemed to be full of rocks and roots and potholes trying to trip us. Alison, her bedraggled hair clinging to her face, looked fit to drop. And Zoë, tinkering with one snap-fit component after another, didn't seem much further from exhaustion. There were several times when I thought she'd finished working, only to pick up the device she'd been tinkering with and start to take it apart again. 

By the time we were passing the burned-out shell of a habidome, Zoë had managed to construct several devices to her satisfaction. She picked up two of them, and held them out to us. 

"Lily, Alison, you can put down the toolkit," she said. "Take these. Stand either side of the track. When I say, stick them on that thing's legs, as close to the hip joint as you can manage. Blue side against the metal. When you attack it, it may designate you as a threat, so don't hang around after you've done it." 

She took a third, larger device from the toolkit, turned to face the implacable figure, and began to walk backward, exactly matching its pace. Alison and I crouched down among the bushes, and waited as the thing came up alongside us, looking as if it was prepared to keep walking until the Sun went nova. 

"Now!" Zoë called. 

We threw ourselves at the figure. I pressed my gadget against its leg; its head snapped round, and I threw myself sideways as the axe whizzed over my head. I ended up on my back in a bramble patch, the thorns tearing at my jumpsuit. The creature loomed over me, its axe raised, blue sparks crackling over its body. I tried to squirm away, but my legs were hopelessly entangled. The axe began to descend— 

There were two sharp detonations, and the figure collapsed with a sound like a metal-recycling pod falling into a foundry. 

I managed to sit up and disentangle my arms from the thorns. The first thing I saw was the top half of the creature that had been chasing us. Its legs were lying a little way away, showing bright metal where they had been severed from its body. The remainder was still trying to drag itself forward with one arm, while clutching onto its axe with the other. 

"It's a robot!" Alison said. She was leaning over the fallen figure. 

"Don't go near it." Zoë hurried up, her own gadget still in her hand. "I hit it with a full-spectrum EM burst. It took every joule in the power cell and it's still moving. I've never heard of anything that could stand up to that. Are you both all right?" 

"I'm OK," Alison said. 

"Just scratches," I added. 

Zoë crossed to where we'd left the toolkit and replaced the device she'd been carrying. "I don't think it would be a good idea for me to touch it again," she said. "Not after last time." 

"So what are we going to do?" Alison asked. 

"You two were able to blow its legs off. Maybe a simple physical attack's the right approach." Zoë pulled out another device, and held it out to Alison. "This is a vibro-cutter. See if you can cut the head off. Then the arms, if there's still enough charge. Try not to touch the body if you can help it." 

Looking pale and nervous, Alison tiptoed up to the fallen robot and bent over it. It was still trying to drag itself towards Zoë, but as Alison pressed the vibro-cutter to its neck, it shuddered and went rigid. The head rolled slightly away from the body. A couple more passes with the cutter took care of the arms. 

"Thanks." Zoë took the cutter back, and returned it to the toolkit. "Lily, are you just going to sit around in that briar patch all day?" 

I tried to free my legs, and found I couldn't. 

"You'll have to give me a hand," I said. "I'm trapped." 

"Is that it?" Alison asked, as Zoë more or less dragged me out of the bramble patch, ripping my jumpsuit to shreds in the process. 

"Oh, no," Zoë said. "This is where it starts to get interesting." 

⁂

_"How are you feeling now?" Colonel Stanley asked Alison. She couldn't see the mind scanner, but she knew it was standing just behind her, its arrays of electrodes lined up like teeth in a gaping mouth._

_"Violated," Alison said, her voice shaking. She sipped at the drink he'd given her, a tepid, metallic-tasting liquid. "You're going to kill me anyway. Why go through all this first?"_

_The Colonel leaned forward earnestly. "Ms Swift. A lot of what you've heard about us has come from, shall we say, less than reliable sources. Please believe me when I say we're not as evil as we're sometimes painted. I can't undo what happened to your friends, but we need to learn everything we can so it doesn't happen to anyone else. We use other sources where we can, obviously, but sometimes we have to employ more... direct methods. Ms Carson wasn't present while you were walking with with Dr Heriot, for example, so her diary is of no help to us there. Some remark Dr Heriot made when you were alone together might be a vital clue to her state of mind."_

_"But she didn't say anything. Not like that."_

_"That's why a psi-probe is essential. It can recover details that you would have overlooked at the time. Now, are you ready for the next session?"_

_Alison drained her cup. "Do I have a choice?"_

_"Not really, no," the Colonel admitted._


	5. Don't Lose Your Head

> _Rien ne pèse tant qu'un secret; Le porter loin est difficult aux dames;  
>  [Nothing weighs so heavy as a secret; women find it difficult to carry one far.] _  
>    — Jean de la Fontaine, _The Women and the Secret_

**Extract from Lily Carson's diary: Saturday 13 February**

We threw the robot's arms and legs into the ditch, and they sank without a trace. When it came to the head and torso, Zoë had other ideas. 

"I need to examine these bits properly," she said. 

I shivered; it hadn't stopped raining, and by now I was soaked through. "What, here and now?" 

"Maybe not on the path," Zoë conceded. "Can we get into that dome?" 

Alison and I dragged the torso into the burned-out shell of the habidome, hoping that we wouldn't knock into something and bring what was left of the dome down on us. Then I brought the head, while Zoë lugged the toolkit in. It wasn't that much more sheltered than the path, but at least we were out of the wind. 

"Can you find a way of opening it up?" she asked. She was obviously itching to get her hands on it, but at the same time she must have realised how dangerous it might be for her to touch it. 

I knelt down and tentatively investigated it. I was expecting it to electrocute me at any moment, or for sharp blades to pop out, or for the whole thing just to explode. Instead, my fingers closed around what felt like a nut. 

"I think this panel unscrews," I said. 

Zoë handed me an adjustable spanner. "Anticlockwise?" she asked. 

It took me some effort to shift the nut, but in the end it moved. 

"Yes," I said. "Anticlockwise. Is there something wrong with that?" 

"If it was made by aliens, their screws might work the other way," Alison said. "That's right, isn't it?" 

"That's right," Zoë said. "It would be fifty-fifty whether they did it the same way we do." 

Five nuts later, the panel was free. Zoë and Alison had looked at each nut as I'd removed it, but hadn't been able to draw any conclusions apart from the fact that they didn't match; they looked as if they'd been pulled at random from a parts bin. 

"I think I can open it now," I said. "Shall I?" 

"Go on," Zoë said eagerly. 

I lifted the panel away. Inside was the most terrific tangle of wires, circuits and unrecognisable components I'd ever seen. Zoë darted forward, only stopping herself from touching it at the last moment, and stared at the chaos in rapt concentration. 

"That's interesting," she said presently. 

Alison and I exchanged glances, wondering which one of us should ask 'What's interesting?'. In the end, neither of us did, but Zoë answered the question anyway. 

"There's an incredible amount of redundancy in this design," she said. "I don't know what all these systems are, but some of them seem to be replicated up to eight times." 

"Don't touch anything," I said. 

"I'm not." To give her her due, Zoë was keeping her hands safely behind her back. She was on her feet now, darting around the torso, trying to examine the circuitry from every possible angle. 

"Are we going to be here all night?" I asked. I was soaked to the skin and chilled to the bone, and the remains of the dome weren't doing much to protect me from the elements. Alison's teeth were chattering, too. 

Zoë looked up reluctantly. "You're right, we need to get back. But there are some bits we can't risk leaving here. Do you think you could disconnect this component and get it out? Oh, and try not to drip all over it," she added, as I crossed the room to join her. 

Under her direction, I removed several gadgets and filed them carefully in the toolkit. Each time, I had to cut them free from the rat's nest of wiring inside the robot. Some of the wires looked brand new, others crumbled away in a shower of rust when I touched them. I didn't have a clue what any of the equipment was supposed to do, but then I'm sure that was the point. It was nearly dark by the time I'd finished. 

"Now what?" Alison said. 

"We can't leave the torso here," Zoë said reluctantly. "It'll have to go in the ditch." 

We dragged it out, and pushed it into the ditch, a little way down from where we'd dumped the limbs. It disappeared with a gurgle. 

"That's great," Zoë said, as I straightened up. "Alison, can you bring the head?" 

Alison darted into the dome, and returned with the head. 

"Now what?" she said. 

"You live near here, don't you?" I said. 

"Yes." 

"Then why don't we go to your place and get cleaned up?" 

Alison, as far as I could see in the twilight, looked embarrassed. "My mum doesn't know about you — about any of this. And if she sees me like this..." 

"Your flat might be more convenient, Lily," Zoë suggested. 

I nodded. "OK. Back to the T-Mat, then." 

By the time we got back to the T-Mat, it was dark. I found that a relief — not just because I didn't want the neighbours to see me in the filthy, ragged remains of my jumpsuit, but so people wouldn't notice just what Alison was carrying in her arms. We made it safely to my flat, and spent most of the evening getting ourselves cleaned up. I decided it wasn't even worth trying to salvage the clothes Alison and I had been wearing; I threw the lot in the waste disposal, and lent her my Ngata Tuahine jumpsuit from last year to go home in. 

"Zoë," I said, once Alison had left. "Are you all right?" 

"What makes you think I'm not?" Zoë said. She wasn't really looking at me; she kept glancing at the robot head, which Alison had left on my coffee table. 

I took a deep breath. "Why didn't you want me to call You-Know-Who? They're the ones who ought to be dealing with something like that. But you insisted on handling it all yourself. That was a crazy risk." 

"It's more fun that way." 

"Please, Zoë, be serious." 

Zoë, finally, turned to look at me. 

"I think I'm stuck at a local maximum," she said. "In my life, I mean. It's a problem with greedy algorithms. At each branch you make an optimal decision, but you don't end up at the best place. So I've been experimenting with suboptimal decisions." 

I nodded. I wasn't following all the mathematical symbolism, but I didn't need that to spot a dissatisfied young woman trying to reinvent herself. That would explain the purple hair, too. 

"And I hope you aren't going to call them now," she went on, sweetly. 

"I ought to. Surely it's just the sort of thing they should be investigating." 

"Yes. But then you'd have to explain why you didn't at the time. And when they find the chassis, you'll have to tell them about all those components you took out of it. You'd have to come up with a very convincing story. They'll probably do a deep psi-probe just to check you aren't lying." 

"Zoë!" I knew she had a mean streak somewhere deep down, but I hadn't expected her to turn it on me. 

"So you won't tell them about the robot, will you?" 

"I won't," I said. "Promise." A thought struck me. "But Alison might." 

"Not if she knows what's good for her," Zoë said, matter-of-factly. "I put the same argument to her while you were in the shower. Her lips are sealed." 

⁂

_Alison, once more pinned in the scanning apparatus, stared blankly at her two interrogators._

_"You knew what you should have done," Major Stewart said._

_"I should have informed the proper authorities," Alison replied, mechanically._

_"Why didn't you?"_

_"Zoë said I'd get into trouble if I did. She said you'd torture me." A faint note of defiance crept into Alison's voice. "She was right."_

_The Colonel cleared his throat. "You didn't think it at all unusual that she wanted to deal with that robot all by herself?"_

_"She wasn't by herself. We were with her."_

_"Consider the question suitably modified."_

_"I thought she was doing it for the kick. She's been an adrenaline junkie for as long as I've known—" Alison stopped, and swallowed. "For as long as I knew her."_


	6. Moral Calculus

> _The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation._  
>    — Jeremy Bentham 

**Extract from Lily Carson's diary: Tuesday 23 March**

Zoë's birthday today. I met up with her and Alison for a girls' night out. She seemed worried about something, but she wouldn't say what it was. I left most of the talking to Alison, who wanted Zoë's opinion on some endless story about a Victorian dairymaid. I couldn't follow it at all, and though Zoë seemed to be keeping up and asking questions, I don't think she was giving it her full attention either.

"What's the matter?" I asked, while Alison was in the Ladies'. 

"Nothing's the matter," Zoë said. "I'm enjoying my night out." 

"You look pale. Are you feeling all right?" 

"I haven't been sleeping very well, that's all." 

I put my hand on hers. "Zoë, please, if there's anything I can do, tell me." 

Her grey eyes seemed to be looking past me, or through me. "No. But I'll show you." 

Sure enough, when the three of us came out of the bar, Zoë took us to the T-Mat and dialled a code I didn't recognise. It teleported us to a courtyard that was almost a plaza, a few timezones away from where we had been; it was a warm evening, close to sunset. The courtyard was surrounded by conical, sober buildings in the style of thirty or so years ago. Groups of people were passing this way and that, mostly looking in their teens or early twenties, and all wearing pale cream jumpsuits with pastel-coloured highlights. There was an earnest, sober look to them, too. 

"Where is this?" Alison asked. 

"The University," Zoë said. "This was where I had most of my education." She looked around, and shivered. "I've never been back before. It feels... weird, I think. As if I could just go back to my cubicle and pick up where I left off. Anyway, this is what I wanted you to see." 

There was a statue in the centre of the courtyard, a young woman, larger than life. The sculptor had depicted her in the uniform of a transport pilot. 

"Danielle Osato," she said. "Pilot of the _Faerie Queene_. Does that mean anything to either of you?" 

Alison shook her head. "Wasn't there... some accident?" 

"That's one way to put it," Zoë said. "The _Faerie Queene_ was a shuttle attached to the survey ship _Drake_. They were conducting a mission in the Asteroid Belt when a fast-moving meteor was detected on collision course with the _Drake_. The shuttle was returning from a study mission at the time. Danielle Osato flew it into the path of the meteor, accurately calculating her trajectory so the impact deflected it away from the _Drake._ " 

"And she was killed?" I asked. 

"Of course. As were the two specialists in the shuttle." Zoë looked up at the statue again. "She was nineteen." 

Alison shuddered. "I couldn't do something like that." 

"That's the point," Zoë said. "Everyone here is trained so that they _can_. To make necessary sacrifices of lives — our own or others'. We all heard recordings of her last transmission. She sounded so calm." She paused. "Of course, it's possible that they re-recorded it with an actor and she actually didn't manage to keep it together till the end. But she still saved the _Drake_ , which is the important thing." 

"If she hadn't..." I said. 

"Then sixteen people on the _Drake_ would have died. And she and the two specialists would have been left in a shuttle with no mothership and no way of getting to safety. The survey project would have been set back a year. You can see why she's a heroine of the Programme." 

I nodded. 

"Of course, since I finished my education and got to know more people, I realised there was another point of view," Zoë said. "The moral the general public took from the incident was: Never trust a madgirl, she'll kill you without even a pause for thought." 

She folded her arms and gave us both a defiant look. 

"Do you mean you could kill someone?" Alison asked nervously. "Even me or Lily?" 

"If it was necessary to save more than two lives..." Zoë closed her eyes. "I hope I could." 

Abruptly, she turned her back on the statue. 

"Let's get back to our night out," she said. "I want to get tipsy, at least." 

⁂

_Major Stewart made a slight adjustment to the psi scan, and checked various readings. Alison appeared to be withstanding the interrogation as well as might be expected._

_"What was the story about a dairymaid?" he asked._

_"I don't... remember," Alison mumbled._

_The Major turned to his superior. "Permission to go deeper, sir?"_

_Colonel Stanley looked at him, then at Alison, the jaws of the scanner clamped around her head. "Granted," he said, with perhaps a touch of regret._

_"What was the story about this Victorian dairymaid?" Major Stewart repeated, his hand moving slowly and carefully across a touchscreen._

_Alison's limbs twitched, and she drew her breath in sharply. "Not Victorian," she said, her voice tight with pain. "Later." She relaxed slightly as the Major's finger moved a little to the left. "Florence Croft was dairymaid at Rushdean Farm in 1910. One night people living nearby said they saw a light over the farm, brighter than the Sun. When they went there the next morning the farm was a ruin. The farmer and his family were dead, and there was no sign at all of Florence._

_"In September 1911, Florence Croft is recorded as marrying George Beckwith in Harrogate. From the records and physical description I'm sure she was the same person. But there's no record of her between those dates. She doesn't appear in the April 1911 census."_

_"Why did you tell Dr Heriot this story?" the Colonel asked._

_"I wanted to see if she could explain it."_

_"Did you have any explanation for it yourself?"_

_"I thought— I think the Ragged Man took her."_

_The Colonel turned to his subordinate. "Cut the power," he said. "Let her rest."_


	7. Bits and Pieces

> _"It's the thing that lures monkeys into cages," he said slowly. "And lures cats into open drawers and up telegraph poles. It's driven men to conquer death, and put the stars into our hands. I suppose I'd call it Curiosity."  
>  Wagoner looked startled. "Is that really what you want to call it?" he said. "Somehow it seems insufficient."_  
>    — James Blish, _They Shall Have Stars_

**Extract from Lily Carson's diary, Thursday 6 May**

When I got home from work today, I found I've been sent a valid token for the next Open Access day at the Ingomar Centre. There's something strange going on, because I certainly didn't apply for it. I wondered if it was to do with one of Zoë's missions, so I messaged her and asked if she'd been sent one too. She hasn't. 

Odd. On the other hand, I'm not turning down a chance to go to the Ingomar Centre. I'll make sure to keep my eyes open, though. 

⁂

_"What do you make of her?" Colonel Stanley said. They'd left Alison in the dead room, sound asleep after the ordeal of her interrogation. They were now in an office, thousands of miles away but equally secure and well-hidden._

_"She seems honest. Loyal. Not an exceptional intellect. And far too curious for her own good."_

_"Quite. That robot was the second alien incursion she's managed to stumble across. Third, if you count the Croft case."_

_Major Stewart glanced around and lowered his voice. "If she's deduced the existence of entity Bohemia Sapphire-011..."_

_"Why not use her terminology? The Ragged Man. Easier to say, and less chance of using any inappropriate language when we're talking to her."_

_"Sir. Then: If she's onto the Ragged Man, do you think he's onto her?"_

_"If our probes are to be believed, she hasn't encountered him yet. And if she did, she might be able to resist him: she has studied him, after all. I think we'll have to draw her out on the subject at some point."_

⁂

**Extract from Lily Carson's diary, Sunday 9 May**  


I haven't heard much from Zoë recently, so I messaged her and asked if I could pop round to her flat. She took a bit of persuading, but eventually agreed. She met me on the doorstep, and it was all too obvious that she still wasn't getting enough sleep. 

"Lily," she said, "do I have your word you won't tell anyone what you see in here? In particular, you won't tell You-Know-Who?" 

"Promise," I said. 

"OK." She beckoned me in, and led me to what was probably intended as the dining area. The components from the robot were neatly laid out on the table: several circuit boards which I guessed were from the head, and some of the devices I'd removed from the body. 

"I've been trying to reverse-engineer it in my spare time," Zoë said. She yawned. "It's quite absorbing." 

"How can you make any sense of that? It's just bits and pieces! And suppose it was aliens who designed it? They wouldn't think like us." 

"I'm not sure who designed it, but it's all solid-state. And that means it's got to obey standard electrical laws. It's nothing like as alien as the reptile people's biotech." Zoë turned to the computer terminal and brought up a diagram. "Here's the basic structure." 

I stared at the diagram and tried to think of something useful to say. "Looks complicated." 

Zoë shook her head. "It isn't, actually. It's the computer equivalent of _Deinococcus Radiodurans._ " 

"What's that?" 

"D. Radiodurans? It's a bacterium that's tremendously resistant to damage, including radiation. It can survive a dose of five thousand Grays — and five Grays would be enough to kill you or me. But it can only do that by devoting nearly all of its biology to self-repair mechanisms." She zoomed in on an area of the diagram. "The same's true of that robot. A lot of this circuitry's here to switch out faulty transputers and switch in working ones. That means there's less room for the transputers themselves." 

"Do you know why it was following you?" 

Zoë tapped one of the components. "This seems to be... well, for want of a better word, a Zoë detector. It's still locked onto me — if I power it up, it can track my movements as far away as the Moon. But that's only _how_ it was following me. As for _why_... well, you can ask it." 

"Ask it?" I repeated. 

"This board's got a full artificial intelligence on it." Zoë connected a couple of cables to one of the circuit boards. "I'd have thought a full AI was far too much for wandering about hitting people with an axe, but I suppose people a hundred years ago would say the same about using what to them would be a supercomputer, just to run a fridge." She reached for the power switch, then paused. "Or maybe an AI was all they had to hand. Have you noticed all the circuits are wire-wrapped, not printed? This robot was hand-made." 

She pushed the power switch up. 

"You can talk to it now," she said. 

I cleared my throat. "Hello." 

"We shall redden our axes in the blood of the Tharils!" a synthesized voice shouted back, and I nearly fell off my chair. Even out of a small loudspeaker, it had all sorts of undertones suggesting battles and victories and glorious massacres. 

"Who are you?" I asked. 

"We are Gundan. We slay the Tharils wherever they may be found. We fight for the slaves, the oppressed, those who cannot fight for themselves. We exist to kill!" 

"OK." I glanced across at Zoë, who had a heard-it-all-before expression. "Why did you try to kill Zoë?" 

Silence. 

"It doesn't know me by my name," Zoë explained. "Try this: Why are you trying to kill your current target?" 

I repeated the question, and got the answer "It is a Tharil." 

"How do you know?" I asked. 

"It has been touched by the Time Winds. It is not slave or Gundan, so it is Tharil. It shall perish at the hands of the Gundan." 

"Ask about the Time Winds," Zoë prompted me. 

I nodded. "Tell me about the Time Winds." 

"Tharils ride the Winds of Time. Where they go, they steal: treasures, food, slaves. Slaves made the Gundan, to ride the Time Winds and fight the Tharil brutes. We pursue the Tharils through all space and all time." 

"Suppose your current target isn't a Tharil?" I asked, trying to sound as reasonable as I could. Whatever 'reasonable' meant to a homicidal alien AI. 

"It is not slave or Gundan, so it is Tharil." the speaker repeated stubbornly. 

"And that's as far as I've ever managed to get," Zoë said, and switched the power off. "It's how it's been programmed. Its Zoë-detector locked onto me, and I don't register as a friend, so I must be an enemy." 

"How does it know you aren't a slave?" 

"Oh. I don't have the 'mark', whatever that is. And I'm obviously not a robot myself, so that only leaves one option. I'm the enemy and need to be destroyed." 

"And it was talking about travelling in time, wasn't it? Zoë, you said there wasn't any such thing as a time machine." 

"Given our current model of the Universe, that's right. We don't have anything like the technology to build one, and if there was one anywhere in the Solar System it would stand out like another Sun." Zoë was detaching the power cables from the AI, and attaching them to one of the other components. "The thing is, some people suspect that our current model of the Universe isn't right. Do you remember back on the _Liberty_ , Captain Newman threw a list of names at me to see how I reacted? Beckett and Whitaker and Kerensky." 

"Yes?" 

"They were all cranks who thought they could build a time machine. And... _things_ happened to them before they could. The official records say things like 'lab accident'. Alison's got her own theories." 

"You've talked to her about this?" 

"Only the time travel aspect, in general terms." Zoë had by now finished connecting the component up to various pieces of equipment. "Would you like to see a time machine?"


	8. Balance of Probabilities

> _Probability is the very guide of life._  
>    — Joseph Butler, _The Analogy of Religion_

_"Ms Swift."_

_Alison woke from nightmares, and remembered she was living something not much better. The dead room didn't look any more welcoming after a night spent asleep in it. Or a day; she'd long since lost track of time._

_"I suppose you're going to stick me in that machine again," she said, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes._

_"Not just yet." The Colonel sat down opposite her. Alison looked around, but it seemed he hadn't brought the Major with him this time. "I thought we'd have an informal chat, first."_

_"I don't have anything to say to you," Alison said. She'd hoped to sound defiant, but it came across as sulky even in her own ears._

_"Really? What if I were to mention the name 'Kerensky' to you, for example?"_

_"Who?"_

_"Come now, Ms Swift. We know you discussed a scientist by that name with Dr Heriot. I'd like to know your conclusions, that's all."_

_"He was killed in a lab fire while doing sponsored research on the genetics of poultry."_

_"That's the official story, of course. Nobody who's studied it seriously believes it for a moment."_

_Alison stared at him. "You mean..."_

_"I suggest a bargain, Ms Swift. You tell me what you think happened to Kerensky. What you_ really _think. And then we'll tell you the truth."_

_"The truth?"_

_"The truth is out there... isn't that the old saying?" The Colonel gave her an avuncular smile. "Always chasing it, and seeing it run away from you, faster than you can follow. But here, there's nowhere left to run. I can give you the truth about Kerensky, Ms Swift. Do we have a deal?"_

⁂

**Extract from Lily Carson's diary: Sunday 9 May**  


"That's a time machine?" I asked Zoë, looking at the object on her table. It was a rust-coloured, roughly spherical device, with wires attached at several points; I remembered the struggle I'd had getting it out of the robot in one piece.

"No," Zoë said. "But I think it's part of one. That AI talked about riding the Time Winds. I think this approximates to an aileron or a rudder. Watch the screen." 

She turned the power on. The screen lit up with a complicated waveform, constantly changing. As I concentrated on the waveform, wondering what I was supposed to see, Zoë took a die and tossed it onto the table in front of the machine. The waveform quivered, and split into six smaller waveforms, one of which rapidly grew to fill the screen.

"It tracks the different possibilities," Zoë said. "It can do more, too. First, throw the die a few times to make sure it's fair. Just as a control." 

I did. All the numbers seemed to come up about as often as each other. 

Zoë tapped at the computer. "Now try." 

"Four." I picked up the die and threw it again. "Four. Four. Four. Hang on, what if I..." 

I set the die down on the table, with '2' uppermost. I'd half-expected it to flip over to '4', but it stayed as I'd left it. 

"It can only influence probabilities," Zoë said, shutting the power off. "If '4' is a possible outcome, it can somehow make sure that possibility comes about. But if '4' isn't, it won't." She sat back in her chair. "Anyway, that's where I've got to so far. It's an ongoing project." 

"I still think you should tell You-Know-Who about it." 

Zoë shook her head firmly. "It's too dangerous. Just for starters, it could probably act as a Turing Oracle." 

"A what?" 

"A machine that gives you the right answer to any computational question: all you have to do is check it. Think about trying to decrypt a message using a random key. There are two outcomes: Success and failure. Tell the machine you want success, and it'll twist time so the random generator comes up with the correct key first time." 

I stared at the collection of parts on the table. "It can do that?" 

"It probably could, given enough time and study. So you see it's far too dangerous to let anyone else hear about it. I've only told you. Make sure it doesn't go any further." 

I hastily agreed. And I'm going to encrypt this diary entry — for all the good that will do, if anyone does get their hands on those bits of robot. 

⁂

_"And that's the whole truth?" Alison asked._

_The Colonel nodded. "To the best of our knowledge. Kerensky had made progress towards creating a time machine — enough that certain people found it expedient to destroy him and the machine."_

_"Certain people," Alison repeated. "You don't know who?"_

_"No, but we have our theories. I'm sure you do, too. For now, I think we'll simply say 'no Earthly power.' Now, are you ready to resume the investigation?"_

_"You mean have that scanner poke around in my head again?"_

_"Dear me, no. All I'm going to do is show you some surveillance holograms from the Ingomar Centre. Let me know if you recognise anybody."_

⁂

**Extract from Lily Carson's diary: Thursday 13 May**

Today was the day for the Ingomar Centre. Wore my best clothes — it was just as well I did, because that was definitely what all the other visitors were wearing. Either that or fancy dress; a lot of people were there in historical costumes, including some of the guides. 

The Centre's a massive place — a tower that wouldn't look out of place in Madrid or Chongquing, except it's on a little islet in the Southern Ocean. Inside it's like a kaleidoscope, all sorts of scientific and creative activities next to each other, in no particular order. According to what we were told, it's meant to promote cross-pollination of ideas. Once a year they change round where everyone's based, so everyone gets to meet new people. The whole place must cost FaloCorp a fortune to run, but they reckon some of the ideas that came out of there were worth millions. 

Visitors were allowed to wander where they liked, so the first place I went was the fashion department. Or part of it, at least — it was on one of the spiral corridors between the writing team for _Benko Schutz, Space Cadet_ and a metallurgy lab. I'd hoped to get the low-down on what would be in next year, but they weren't giving anything away. They were running through the design process from tablet to finished garment, using the current range as an example. They said there were more people in the process than it took to run a warship, and I can easily believe it. 

I was so busy looking around that I certainly didn't have time to think about the mystery of who'd invited me there in the first place. Until I decided to take a break, and wandered into a room they called a 'creativity pod'. It was pretty odd: it was shaped like an egg standing on the blunt end, and the walls were mainly black but lined with a network of softly glowing ribs, which very slowly changed colour. The only furniture in the room was six or so chairs, which were also egg-shaped and glowed in different colours. 

I subsided into the nearest egg. To give credit where it's due, it was pretty comfortable. But almost as soon as I'd sat down, a soft chime sounded. It was followed by a recorded voice. 

"Your attention," it said. "This area of the tower has been secured by hexfield. Please remain where you are and wait for assistance. Do not be alarmed: you are in no danger." 

I wasn't in any position to obey that last instruction; I'd jumped to my feet and hurried to the doorway. Against the dim lighting, it was easy to see that it was now blocked by a force field. I gave the field an experimental poke, just to check it was solid. It was. 

A few seconds later, I heard footsteps, and two people came into view. They were both wearing old-fashioned clothes — a man dressed as a Roman centurion, and a tall, redheaded woman in a police uniform from the last century, complete with hat. As I've said, a lot of people were in fancy dress, including historical costumes. These two wouldn't have stood out from the crowd. 

For a moment the policewoman looked at me with an expression almost of shock, but she recovered quickly. "She'll do," she said. 

The centurion nodded, and drew his sword. "You're coming with us," he said. 

My throat had gone dry at the sight of the half-metre of steel pointing straight at me. "Me?" 

"Of course you." The policewoman gave me an impatient look. "Does it look like there's anyone else here?" 

The forcefield between us winked out. 

"Don't think about trying to make a run for it," the centurion said. "You'd hit a forcefield at the first doorway you came to." 

I nodded. Whoever these two were, they obviously had control over the forcefields in the tower — and that meant they were obviously more than just a couple of cosplayers. 

The policewoman pressed a button on her prehistoric communicator. 

"I know you're all listening," she said. "We've got a hostage. If you try and stop us she'll regret it. Leave us alone and no-one gets hurt. I want all corridors cleared between here and section HW-424. Got that?" 

There was a crackly response from the communicator. 

"Good." She turned the communicator off again. "Let's go." 

They marched me to the nearest grav-tube. Once we'd got out of that we headed through a series of corridors and linkways. Now and again we passed doorways, all blocked off by force fields. Several times there were people watching wide-eyed, or what looked like security guards ready to pounce given the slightest chance. 

After we'd been walking for a while, we came out onto an enclosed bridge. The walls and floor were made of green-tinted glass, so I could see that the bridge crossed a cylindrical chamber, ten or more metres above floor level. 

The policewoman came to a sudden halt. "Drone," she said. 

Sure enough, I could see the spiky black shape of a security drone hovering in the air at the far end of the bridge. It was drifting toward us, weapons levelled and ready; I think it fired a dart of some kind, but it must have bounced off the centurion's armour. Then it suddenly dropped out of the air, bounced twice on the glass floor, and rolled to a standstill. 

The policewoman turned her communicator on again. "I told you to leave us alone," she said. "Don't forget we've got a hostage, and we're not afraid to use her." 

Burning pain shot through my legs, and I couldn't help screaming. 

"See what I mean?" the policewoman added. "So no more stupid tricks with drones — or anything else." 

She walked forward, picked up the drone, and turned back to look at me. 

"Can you still walk?" she asked. 

"I... yes," I said. The pain was rapidly fading. 

She nodded. "Then walk." 

Another ten or so minutes brought us to section HW-424. It looked just like any other corridor in the Centre; there were posters advertising FaloCorp's latest creative endeavours, some chairs, a drinks machine, and a few doors, most of them open. 

We passed two doors — one seemed to be some kind of design workshop, another a flight simulator — and came to a third. It didn't look different from any of the other doors, except that it was closed, and there wasn't any sort of sign to say what might be behind it. It didn't slide open as we approached it, either. 

The policewoman pulled a small sphere, about the size of a plum, from her uniform, and ran it down the centreline of the door. The door sparked, and then the two halves slid apart. On the other side I couldn't make out much, except a vague impression of shelves laden with boxes. 

"Go in," the centurion said. 

"Me?" I asked. 

The policewoman nodded. "Yes, you." 

I swallowed. "It won't kill me or anything?" 

"Go in," the centurion repeated. 

With the tip of his sword pricking at my back, I obviously didn't have much of a choice.


	9. Amelia and Appropriation

> _Stealing by spiritual methods seem to me much the same as stealing by material ones._  
>    — G. K. Chesterton, _The Song of the Flying Fish_

**Extract from Lily Carson's diary: Thursday 13 May**

I walked through the doorway, expecting all sorts of alarms to go off the moment I crossed the threshold. Or a big hand to come down from the ceiling and grab me. None of that did happen, though I could feel a fine mist in the air that was probably some kind of tracking compound. 

"Now what?" I said. 

"Open the boxes," the policewoman said. "The ones we tell you. And show us what's in them." 

"Don't touch what's in there — just hold the box up," the centurion added. 

I couldn't see how I was supposed to do that. All the boxes had electronic locks and thumbprint scanners. But whatever these people had done to override the forcefields also seemed to have deactivated the security systems on the boxes; they popped open at the first touch. The boxes were different sizes, but none bigger than forty centimetres or so. As for what was inside them, they were a complete mixture. Some looked like bits of computer, or spare parts for a machine I'd never heard of. Others were blackened and distorted, as if they were the debris from some kind of accident. There were carefully-sealed jars containing a variety of liquids. And there were were boxes containing nothing but bones. 

Nearly all of the boxes just got a cursory glance, a brief nod, and then I'd have to close the box and put it back. Now and again, though, they'd have a rummage in one of the boxes, and perhaps take something out; they deliberately made me hold the boxes so I couldn't see whether they took anything or not. There wasn't any delay or hesitation, and they didn't talk to each other at all while going through the boxes. It was as if they were working from a list they'd agreed in advance. If they were stealing things, they couldn't have been big, or I couldn't have helped seeing them. 

"Thank you for your time," the centurion said, once they'd had me go through every last box. 

"Now turn your back and close your eyes," the policewoman added. 

"Are you going to kill me?" I said. 

"Just do what you're told." 

"Why should I, if you're going to kill me?" 

The policewoman shrugged. "Fair enough. But I'd take a step back if I were you." 

I jumped back as the doors slammed, leaving me locked in a pitch-black storeroom. I stood there in the darkness, hardly daring to breathe let alone move, in case I broke something I shouldn't. 

What felt like hours later, the door opened again to reveal three armed security guards, with drones hovering behind them. I raised my hands, and wondered how on Earth I was going to explain myself. 

⁂

_The holographic projection winked out._

_"Did you recognise them?" the Colonel asked._

_With a jump, Alison returned from her thoughts. "Lily described them to me," she said, trying to sound impartial and scientific. "They're just like she said. And... well, the man does look just like those legends of the Last Centurion. Are all the legends_ true _?"_

_"Oh, no." The Colonel gave her a sympathetic look. "After all, there are legends that have a happy ending. In our line of business, that's not so common."_

_Alison looked up at him. "Why did you show me that?"_

_"Because we'd like your opinion on it. As... shall we say, an interested amateur?"_

_"I've read the stories about the Last Centurion." Alison felt as if she was adrift in uncharted waters. "If that's him, was the woman called Amelia?"_

_"An excellent guess, Ms Swift."_

_"But Amelia Pond was born in the last century! And... if those were the same people Lily saw in Lower Gooch Street, they—"_

_"Never mind Lower Gooch Street for now," the Colonel said. "We'll come to that in good time."_

⁂

**Extract from Lily Carson's diary: Thursday 13 May (well, the morning of Friday 14 really)**

It's past midnight. I was with FaloCorp security till after dark, telling my story again and again. In the end they sent me home and I've written the whole thing out again in this diary. But I still don't feel anything like sleep. All I want to do is pace up and down. 

To space with it. I'm going to call Zoë. 

**Later:** I feel a bit calmer now. 

I don't know how coherent I was when I got hold of Zoë, but she must have got the idea that it was something serious, because she T-Matted straight over. 

"Lily!" she said, and hugged me tightly. "Are you all right? They didn't hurt you?" 

"I'm OK," I said. "I just need someone to talk to." 

"Do you want to tell me what happened?" 

"Try and stop me," I said, and let her have the whole story. By the end of it, Zoë had the sort of keen expression she always gets when she's investigating a mystery. 

"You realise that it's very unlikely they picked you as their hostage at random?" she said. "You were only at the Ingomar Centre because someone sent you a token. Let's start there. Have you still got the token?" 

I shook my head. "Their security team took it." 

"Can you remember anything about how it arrived?" 

"Through the pneumatic tube one morning, with the usual deliveries." I closed my eyes and tried to remember. "In a standard package, keyed to my thumbprint." 

"So it opened, and you found a token." 

"Yes. I realised what it was for — it had a little label saying something like 'open access day, admit one' and the date. I wondered if it was anything to do with you, so I called you." 

Zoë nodded. "I remember." 

"Anyway, I checked the token with FaloCorp and they said it was valid and they couldn't give me any details about who bought it. It was to do with customer confidentiality." 

"I suppose that makes sense. They'd have thought it was a surprise present or something and not thought twice about it. Of course, if their security division's got any sense they'll be going through all the details with a fine-resolution scanner right now." She sat back, with the air of one turning over a page in a mental notebook. "Now, concerning the actual crime, there are a few points I'd like to go into in more detail." She looked me up and down. "It's probably best if we leave them until after you've had a chance to sleep, though." 

I nodded. "OK. Zoë, do you think you could investigate this? You know, sort of officially, like we did the other times?" 

"Well, I suppose I could ask You-Know-Who. But unless they had some interest of their own in the case, I don't see why they'd let me." 

"You couldn't call in a favour or two?" 

"Lily, they're a secret paramilitary force with powers that aren't particularly clearly defined. I really don't think that they have any time for the concept of favours." 

"I suppose not." 

"Still, I'll do what I can. I'll message you if there's any news." 

She's gone now. I'll have to see what sleep I can get for the rest of the night. 

⁂

_Alison leaned forward. "If that woman was Amelia Pond, that must mean the Ragged Man sent her. And that means he was behind the whole thing, doesn't it?" She looked at her interrogators. "Sorry. Did I tell you about the Ragged Man?"_

_"We know precisely whom you mean," Colonel Stanley said. "We have another name for him, but 'the Ragged Man' will do perfectly well."_

_"So when Lily got sent that free token or whatever it was... he was the one who sent it?"_

_"It's a reasonable conclusion. We don't have any evidence for it, though."_

_"And if he knew about Lily even then..." Alison took another look at the holographic image. "I suppose he wasn't there himself so that Lily wouldn't recognise him if she saw him again. But wouldn't that be the same for the other two, as well?"_

_"Presumably that was a risk he was prepared to take." The Colonel gave Alison a long look. "They aren't the only tools at his disposal, after all."_


	10. Legal Action

> _No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth._  
>    — Jean Girardoux, _La Guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu_

**Extract from Lily Carson's diary: Saturday 15 May**

Zoë rang me up early this morning. 

"I think I've got us into FaloCorp," she said. "Meet me at your local T-Mat in twenty minutes. Smart clothes." 

I was at the T-Mat at the time she'd said, and almost to the second Zoë popped into existence in the booth. She was dressed in a new-looking business catsuit. 

"Did you get accreditation from You-Know-Who?" I asked. 

Zoë shook her head. "Not as a detective. They were willing to help, but FaloCorp deny that there was any incursion at all — they haven't informed any law-enforcement agencies. You can't officially investigate an incident that officially never happened." 

"But you must have come up with something, or you wouldn't be here." 

"I'm an ambulance-chasing lawyer nosing around for compensation. We've got an appointment with their legal department. Oh, and you need to remember my name's Kate Compline. Got that?" 

I suppose when people went everywhere by monorail or sub-orbital flight, they'd have had time to prepare themselves before plunging into that sort of deception. I felt like I barely had time to draw breath before we'd been teleported to FaloCorp's legal division. They weren't in a big, impressive tower like the Ingomar Centre, but just a few floors in an anonymous office block. We signed various registers and were whisked through a security scanner to a conference room. Shortly afterwards a tall, skinny, well-dressed man with a short black beard joined us. 

"Jakob Takwatra," he said. "Pleased to meet you, Ms Compline. And Ms Carson, please accept our full apologies for your unhappy experience at our open access day." 

"That's what I'm here to talk about," Zoë said. "It seems to me that Ms Carson has a strong case against you and whoever's responsible for this outrage. You were obviously negligent in your duty of care to your visitors to allow two armed robbers to enter your premises and take my client as a hostage." 

"Surely this is a matter for law enforcement?" Mr Takwatra said, trying to sound soothing. 

"Since FaloCorp has chosen to deal with this matter internally, then you must _ipso facto_ be dealing with any repercussions arising from it. My client can hardly expect a Zone Authority to compensate her without so much as a crime number, can she?" 

He shook his head, looking at me rather than Zoë. "Please, Ms Carson, believe me when I tell you that we will pass on any information we discover to the proper authorities. Our inquiry is in its early stages at present, however, and we simply have no such information to pass on. FaloCorp are as much a victim of this crime as you are, of course." He tapped at a panel on the top of the table, and one wall of the room lit up with a lengthy contract. 

"In order to save you and your legal team from fruitlessly wasting their time," he went on, "perhaps I had better show you the clauses in our standard contract relevant to open access days. You will see that Ms Carson is estopped from any and all action howsoever and by whatsoever—" 

"Even if that clause is ruled enforceable, my client never signed that contract," Zoë cut in. "The contract was established in the first place with the purchaser of the access token. Whoever that may prove to be; I presume you've got adequate records on that point." 

"If not, I expect you'll try adding negligence to the list," Mr Takwatra said, with a look that suggested he'd just like to see Zoë try. 

"Gross negligence," Zoë shot back. "And reckless endangerment. Not only did your security procedures fail to stop two dangerous criminals strolling through your premises like they owned them, one of your drones opened fire on my client." 

"That's nonsense. It was targeting the intruders, and we've got the logs to prove it. Why don't I show you?" 

He tapped at the control panel again. This time the wall lit up with a false-colour display, showing me standing between the two intruders. Various pieces of targeting information were superimposed; so was a crosshair. 

"There you are," he said. "It's quite clear that the drone was not targeting Ms Carson at any point." 

"I see," Zoë said. "But you still haven't explained how two armed criminals were able to wander into your premises at will, kidnap and assault my client, and leave without being traced. You've got imagery of them: what are you doing with it?" 

Mr Takwatra's expression was guarded. "We're following lines of inquiry, of course," he said. "But whatever means the intruders used to bypass the locks and forcefields also affected internal surveillance systems. It has not yet proved possible to reconstruct their movements." 

"More incompetence," Zoë said. 

"Our security system matches all current requirements, and is certified independently. We cannot be held responsible for technology in advance of—" His face had been reddening, and he broke off. "Ms Compline, do you have any other questions?" 

"Only regarding the tracking spray that was released when my client entered the storage area," Zoë said. "Have you instructed the appropriate agencies not to take action should they scan Ms Carson and detect it?" 

He paged through several screens of information. "Yes: it's been reported as an accidental discharge." 

"Very well." Zoë sat back in her chair. "No further questions." 

"If you don't mind, Ms Compline... were you engaged on the basis of no win, no fee?" 

Zoë put on her best poker face. "I cannot confirm or deny that." 

"I thought so." He shook his head. "You don't have a case, Ms Compline. And you certainly won't get a fee." 

⁂

"Was he right?" I asked. We'd T-Matted back to my flat, and were talking the matter over. 

Zoë nodded. "From his point of view, almost certainly. Even if we had a case they could tie us up in so many legal knots it wouldn't be worth my while as an ambulance-chaser to pursue it. And I've no idea if we would have a case. I'm not a lawyer, after all, I just speed-read a couple of beginners' manuals." 

"So what did we see him for?" 

"Well, if they do find anything useful about who did it maybe they'll share it with us. But mainly it was to find out what FaloCorp know." 

"Not much," I said. "Or at least, not much they're letting on about." 

"They know a bit more than they told us." Zoë smiled. "Mr Takwatra got careless at the end, letting me see what was on his screen." 

"But that went through far too fast to read." 

Zoë tapped her head. "Eidetic memory." 

"So what did it say?" 

"The token was purchased at a walk-in booth in Brasilia by someone calling themself Robin Hood, and the payment was a crypto transaction with a one-time key. The delivery address was an anonymous forwarding service in Monaco. There weren't even any security cameras covering the booth." 

"Not much help there, then. Was there anything else?" 

"Visual recognition software can't track the two suspects arriving or leaving. They're having a team of specialists go through the records in case they spot something the computers have missed. Either they got in by some way that isn't monitored—" 

"But that tower's in the middle of the sea!" 

"Quite, and they couldn't have missed them if they'd come on a boat or a skimmer. So the conclusion is they must have used disguises, really good ones. But Mr Takwatra wasn't lying when he said they'd compromised the surveillance system; there's no footage of them changing, so no-one knows what the disguises might look like." 

"So we haven't got any clues at all." 

"There were a couple of other things. That drone, the one the intruders knocked down. It hasn't been recovered. Hopefully if it shows up somewhere that might give us a lead. I got its serial number from that screenshot we were shown. 

"And the other thing was a paragraph saying that the Travsol project were conducting their own audit of the storage area that was raided. Presumably they're the ones who own the boxes in there. If we could get in touch with them maybe we could find out what was worth stealing — if anything was stolen, of course." 

"I don't know why they bothered scanning us for recording devices," I said. "You _are_ a recording device."


	11. Deceives the Eye

> _Hell is a city much like London._  
>    — Percy Bysshe Shelley, _Peter Bell the Third_

**Extract from Lily Carson's diary: Wednesday 26 May**

Got another update from Zoë about her investigation at FaloCorp, though there really wasn't anything to report. No-one's seen the centurion, the policewoman, or the drone (or if they have they aren't saying) and no-one seems to have heard of the Travsol project either. Zoë says in order to keep up her cover as a lawyer, she's sent FaloCorp a few likely and unlikely requests for evidence, but if she doesn't get anywhere she'll have to call the whole 'case' off. 

**Extract from Lily Carson's diary: Thursday 27 May**

Came home from work tonight and found Zoë on my doorstep. She was wearing a cream-coloured trenchcoat — which was odd, because it was a warm night. 

"Whatever your plans were tonight, cancel them," she said. "I've got a lead on that drone. A burglar was arrested in central London this morning, and when he was searched they found a set of tranq-darts. They come from the missing drone — the serial numbers match." 

"Did he say where he got them?" 

"Off the back of a delivery pod, I presume," Zoë said. "But they got the truth out of him pretty quickly. He'd bought them from a trader at the Shadow Market." 

"The Shadow Market? I thought that was something they made up for ' _Charlie Forbes Investigates_ '." 

"Apparently not. Well, the police have closed their investigation — they've got enough evidence to have the burglar re-conditioned, and as far as they know the darts aren't stolen." 

"Because FaloCorp are pretending the whole thing never happened." 

"Right. But You-Know-Who spotted the details in the police database, and let me know. So we're going to the Shadow Market and seeing what we can learn." She looked me up and down. "Do you think you could change into something a bit more disreputable?" 

Within minutes I'd changed into casual clothes and was at the T-Mat booth ready for action. Zoë keyed in the appropriate coordinates, and we were instantly transported to what I later learned was Carnaby-A2 block. 

It had been early evening when we left my flat, but in this timezone it was already dark. We emerged from the block into a damp, drizzly night, with three of the five Soho Towers in front of us. In between them, light shone up through the glass bottoms of the canals, sending shimmering flickers across the towers. Just in front of us, surrounded by the four towers, was a huge landscaped area, elaborately artificial. The astroturf was crowded with stalls, sideshows, wandering performers, and people who had come to watch them. What sounded like several different musicians were playing, but I could hardly hear them over the sound of the crowd. Which was probably just as well, because as far as I could tell they were all playing different tunes. 

"This is an ordinary carnival," I said. "Isn't it?" 

"Well, it is," Zoë said. "But as I understand it, some people here are selling more than just steviafloss." 

We drifted through the crowds. I wondered if there was some sort of secret sign Zoë had to look out for, or perhaps make. The situation was giving me uncomfortable reminders of the open access day. There weren't as many cosplayers among the crowd, but some of the performers were wearing old-style clothes. There was a tall, clumsy-looking man in a tweed jacket, with a big, floppy hat and a bowtie— 

⁂

_"That's him!" Alison said sharply. "The Ragged Man!"_

_She looked at Colonel Stanley and deflated a little. "Sorry. I didn't mean to interrupt. Lily never told me she saw him then."_

_"Why should she?" the Colonel said. "She bumped into a stranger— that's all it was, as far as she was concerned. You hadn't told her about the Ragged Man at that point, had you? Besides, given the later events of the evening, there would be no reason for her to consider this one in any way significant."_

_"I wish I'd told her about him earlier." Alison shook her head. "She probably wouldn't have believed me, but maybe she'd have..."_

_"That 'maybe' is something we all have to live with, I'm afraid. And perhaps she_ did _just bump into a stranger. We haven't been able to establish that the man Ms Carson encountered was anything other than a human with an eccentric taste in clothes."_

_"I bet it was him," Alison said, quietly._

⁂

**Extract from Lily Carson's diary: Thursday 27 May**

"Sorry," the man said. "I've spilt your drink." 

"I didn't have a drink," I said. 

He smiled. "I'll get you one, then." 

"Can we skip straight to the end?" I said. "You're not my type and I haven't got time for this." 

Without giving him time to answer, I looked around for Zoë, and realised we'd got separated. I caught a flash of her pale overcoat through the crowd a little way away; I hurried after her, but got caught up in the flow of people heading over one of the canal bridges. Once I'd got clear of them she was much further away; I gave chase, but it took several minutes before I'd caught up with her. Then, when I got a clear view of the person in the overcoat, it turned out not to be Zoë at all: it was a much taller woman. 

I retraced my footsteps back to where we'd parted, but I couldn't see any sign of her. I hung around for a while, in case she had the same idea and came back to find me. It didn't lead to anything, except me feeling cold and hungry and annoyed at myself. 

"Roll up!" a man's voice called nearby. "Roll up! The famous Tish Lamont, the preeminent prestidigitator of the Solar System, the doyenne of deception, will perform tonight for your entertainment and enjoyment!" 

As he spoke, a tall, slender, middle-aged woman climbed up onto a platform nearby. She was dressed in old-fashioned clothes: a tailored black jacket, grey trousers and a top hat. 

"Thank you, one and all," she said. "Now, then. Might I ask for the cooperation of an audience member? You, perhaps, miss?" 

The conjurer's assistant, a fat, rubicund man who was wearing similarly antiquated clothes and a Union Jack waistcoat, descended from the platform into the crowd, and returned leading none other than Zoë herself. I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw her: she must have been metres from where I was the whole time, with just the corner of the stage blocking our view of each other. 

"Will you take this innocent pack of cards, miss? Examine them, front and back — they are, are they not, a completely ordinary pack of cards, not marked in any way. Is that so?" 

"I suppose so," Zoë said. She sounded as impatient as I looked. 

"She supposes so! I think we've got a skeptic here, ladies and gentlemen. Well, let's see how long that lasts. Pick a card, any card, and don't show me which one it is..." 

I kept my eyes on the conjurer as she shuffled the remaining cards, sent them flying through the air, tipped them into a wooden coffer, and opened it to reveal a vase of flowers. All the time she kept up her patter, while Zoë stood quietly to the side trying not to fidget. 

"So now, I take the vase, place it between the fingers — so — and what do we have?" She drew a playing card out and held it up in front of the audience. "The seven of diamonds. Will you please show the audience your card, miss?" 

Zoë held up her own card: the seven of diamonds. I joined in the crowd's applause. 

"Thank you, miss. Keep smiling!" 

As Zoë was escorted off the stage, I hurried after her and this time managed to catch up with her; she seemed to be keen on putting as much distance between her and the stage as possible. 

"There you are," she said. "Where do you think you've been?" 

"Someone distracted me," I said. 

"Probably deliberately." Zoë looked around, and came to a stop. We were on one of the canal bridges, the light shining up through the glass floor of the canal below. 

"We don't seem to have got anywhere," I said. "OK, I get that whatever the Shadow Market is, it's disguised as an ordinary carnival. But how do we get through the disguise?" 

"You-Know-Who were sketchy about that," Zoë said. "The Colonel said 'you don't find the Shadow Market, it finds you.'" 

"But how does it know we're even looking for it?" 

"Apart from us talking about it?" Zoë put her head on one side. "Lily, that conjurer didn't touch my head at any point, did she?" 

"No. I'm sure. Why?" 

"There's something behind my ear." Zoë reached up cautiously, poked in her hair, and produced a small cylindrical object. "Now how did that get there?" 

"The assistant must have put it there. The fat man with the flag on his waistcoat." 

"John Bull," Zoë said mechanically. "Maybe he did. Now, what is this thing?" 

I gave her a worried look. "What if it blows up?" 

"Then it'll blow a hole in the bottom of this canal and flood whatever's underneath. The Lexington Arcade, if I remember rightly. I think that's a little too public." She patted me on the arm. "Seriously, Lily, I don't think it's anything lethal. But it looks as if the Market already knows we're here." 

"So we just wander around and act normal and see if anyone taps us on the shoulder?" 

Zoë returned the cylinder to behind her ear. "That's about the size of it." 

"Then can we start by getting something to eat?" I said. "I'm famished." 

⁂

I felt a bit more optimistic with a couple of hot dog bars inside me, though I didn't think they tasted much like real dog. But it still seemed a long shot that anyone from the Shadow Market would want to talk to us. They were, after all, operating in secret to avoid the police — and if we weren't the police, we were the next best thing. Still, Zoë wanted me there, if only to watch her back, so I stayed with her. Munching our dubious snacks, we leaned on a railing and watched a series of brightly-painted floats gliding along the canal, their antigravs throwing up a fine spray around them. The lead float had a group of men and women in clown costumes, complete with ginger wigs, painted faces and red noses, going through some complicated routine which mainly seemed to involve hitting each other with planks. Behind them, there were floats with fire-eaters, and jugglers, and light-dancers. 

"Interesting sight, isn't it?" a man's voice said, just behind us. 

We looked round. There was an old man, with a long white beard, elaborate robes, and a carved wooden staff. He might have been a druid, or a witch-doctor, or a Lawsonian hierophant, and almost anywhere else he would have been ludicrously conspicuous. In this carnival, no-one was giving him a second look. 

"But I've got far more interesting things to show you," he went on. "How'd you like to see what the future holds for you? Many's the people who've come to praise the day they asked the Prophet Cloudpole for his wise counsel." 

Zoë gulped down the last of her hot dog. "And you're the Prophet Cloudpole?" she asked. 

"The very same. Given counsel and good guidance to crowned heads and to robosan techs straight off the shuttle. What can you give to young and old, rich and poor, king and commoner alike? Why, knowledge, of course." 

"Kings?" I repeated. 

"Ah, if only wee Jimmy Eight had taken old Cloudpole's words to heart." The prophet raised a finger to his lips. "But there! I never breach a client's confidentiality. Will you step this way, ladies?" 

We let him lead us into a dimly-lit tent, filled with the scent of incense. As the flap fell behind us, the sounds of the carnival were muted — so completely that I wondered if there was some kind of noise-cancelling forcefield at work. In the centre of the tent was a small table, with what looked very like a shrouded crystal ball taking pride of place. At the prophet's gesture, we took our seats on one side of the table, and he sat on the other. 

"Now, then," he said. "Swipe my palm with plastic, and the future shall be revealed to you." 

I think no-one's paid for anything by swiping a card since my grandparents' time, but we took his meaning and paid him the fee. 

"Prepare to witness your destiny," he intoned. Slowly and portentously, he lifted the cover off the crystal ball. 

At first the ball just looked like a cloudy sphere on a brass stand, the sort of prop I'd seen dozens of times. But there were twinkling lights within it, steadily brightening, swirling in odd patterns I couldn't drag my eyes away from. Somewhere in the back of my mind, the word _hypnotism_ was floating about, but I didn't have time to pay attention to it. 

⁂

_"Maybe the other man was just a passer-by," Alison conceded. "Because this one—"_

_"You think he's a more likely candidate to be the Ragged Man?" the Colonel asked._

_"Perhaps that tent wasn't really a tent at all. Perhaps Lily couldn't hear any noise from outside because the inside wasn't in the same dimension. Maybe it was a dimensional gateway to... to where he really comes from."_

_The Colonel raised his eyebrows. "You mean fairyland?"_

_"I suppose you're going to say I'm being childish," Alison said._

_"UNISYC doesn't rule anything out, Ms Swift. Take the Cottingley Fairies..."_

_"They were real?"_

_"No, they were Photoshopped. The mystery you need to concern yourself with is how two girls in 1917 came to have access to Photoshop — not to mention the computer to run it on."_


	12. Pursued

> _Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous._  
>    — George Eliot, _Middlemarch_

**Extract from Lily Carson's diary: Thursday 27 May**

I blinked, and sat up. It felt as if I'd almost dozed off, but caught myself at the last minute. Other than that... I tried to remember what I'd seen. There had been a clear image of me in the arms of a tall, dark, smouldering hero, who looked a bit like Duncan Kogo, against a background of lonely moors. But beyond that, nothing. 

"I saw... a man," I mumbled. "A stranger." 

"The proverbial tall, dark stranger?" Zoë said. 

The prophet ignored her. "Your heart is bruised," he said, his eyes holding mine. "Take care to whom you entrust it." 

"And what about me?" Zoë asked. 

"A box without hinges, lid or key: And what's within, no man may see," the old man replied. "The secrets you carry have a price. Beware those who covet them." 

"Oh!" Zoë looked taken aback. "How did you..." 

"Craft secrets are not to be shared, young lady." The prophet rose to his feet, clearly indicating the seance was over. "Do, please, remember that the future is never fixed. And take my visions — all such visions — as gentle guidance, not inescapable fate." 

We left the tent, and found a quiet corner by a ventilation tower where we could talk. 

"He wasn't just a showman," I said. "That crystal ball... I thought I was being hypnotised. Only not quite." 

Zoë nodded. "I suspect it's built on parapsychic technology. But that's usually restricted to the military. I hadn't thought of how useful it could be in a fortune-telling act." 

"You mean it showed us what we wanted to see?" 

"Something like that. And we probably talked a bit, too, enough for him to work out what we were seeing. You've also realised, of course, how useful that information would be to the people controlling access to the Shadow Market." 

"You mean this was a test?" 

"Almost certainly." 

"I hope we passed, then." 

⁂

Not too far from the prophet's tent was what looked like a standard cargo module. There was a sign over the loading hatch reading GHOST TRAIN, and the outside end was suitably painted with pictures of witches, vampires, ghouls and so forth. 

Still trying to keep up our act as innocent carnivalgoers, we queued patiently for the module and climbed into one of the cars. Steel bars locked into position across our laps, preventing us from moving. Then the car glided through a curtain of vile-feeling rubbery strands, and into darkness. Somewhere up ahead there were skeletons dancing a jig, and I could hear screams from some of the other visitors. But before we could get close to the skeletons, the car suddenly swerved to the left. I got the vague impression in the pitch blackness that the wall ahead had slid aside, and then slid back behind us. A harsh, white light snapped on, illuminating the car from above. 

"Names and business," a computer-generated voice asked us. It had the sort of soothing female tones you'd expect from a robot attendant in a nursing home. 

"What?" It took me a moment to get myself together. "Uh, Lily Carson." 

"And Zoë Heriot," Zoë added. "We're looking for information regarding a missing security drone. We think it's likely it passed through this market." 

"Why should we tell you anything?" the voice asked. 

"I'm prepared to pay." 

"With what?" 

Zoë took a deep breath. "Private crypto keys." She reached into her pocket and pulled out a memory wafer. "I created these documents and authenticated them with the key for the Jiangxi department of energy, the DismaCorp media distribution key, and the access key for the Clavius secondary fuel store." 

A hand, that looked as if it came from an animatronic skeleton, reached out of the darkness and took the memory wafer from her. Then there was a lengthy delay, presumably while the person we were talking to checked that the signatures on the documents were authentic. 

"We will answer one question for each key," the voice said, presently. "Do not attempt to breach market confidentiality." 

"Without breaching confidentiality, how did the drone come to be sold in the market?" Zoë asked. 

"A member of the market received a misrouted package from the FaloCorp clothing division. The drone was inside." 

"Was the drone received in one piece and then dismantled here?" 

"Affirmative." 

I could feel Zoë tense beside me. "When the drone was dismantled, what nonstandard equipment or payload did it contain?" 

"Nothing." 

"But that doesn't make any _sense_ ," Zoë muttered, more to herself than me or the voice. 

"Payment is now due." 

"Here you are, then." Zoë pulled a second memory wafer from her pocket and held it out. Again, the skeleton hand took it. Again, there was another long silence. 

"Satisfactory," the voice said. The lights went out, and the car spun rapidly several times before sending us, dizzy and disorientated, back onto the ghost train circuit. Presently, we emerged. 

"I was so sure," Zoë said, still talking more or less to herself. "It was the only logical possibility." She shook herself. "Let's get out of here." 

We walked through the carnival, which was just as busy as when we'd arrived. Casually, Zoë put a hand to her ear. 

"That thing they put behind my ear's gone," she said. 

I nodded. "One of those horrid rubber things on the ghost train must have snagged it. You know, the ones that tickle your head." 

"That makes sense. It's about the only thing in this case that does." Zoë looked weary. "Let's find a T-Mat and get out of here." 

We walked to the nearest tower, and headed for the T-Mat lobby. There was a small queue for the T-Mat; six men, wearing body armour and helmets with tinted visors, seemed to be checking the travellers as they passed through. They didn't answer any questions, just looked carefully at each one and then motioned them through. 

They didn't motion us through. No sooner had they set eyes on us than I felt myself caught and firmly held. 

"Don't try anything funny, Carson," one of them said. "Nor you, Compl— ugh!" 

Zoë hadn't waited for him to finish his speech; she'd caught his wrist and sent him staggering backwards into two of his men. Then she darted for the door, and was through it before any of them could recover the initiative. 

"After her!" the same man snapped. Two of his subordinates set out in pursuit, while the remainder kept a tight hold of me. 

"Take her to the office," the leader said. "And tell Ms Thring we've got one of them." 

⁂

_"How much of this incident were you aware of, Ms Swift?" the Colonel asked._

_Alison shook her head in bewilderment. "None of it. Lily just said they'd been to the carnival. Who were those men and what did they want with Lily?"_

⁂

**Extract from Lily Carson's diary: Thursday 27 May**

The men who'd captured me took me down a couple of flights of stairs, and then into what looked like a small library. 

"You two, make sure she doesn't go anywhere," the leader said. 

He marched out, leaving me under the eyes of two watchful guards. 

We stayed like that — me sitting in the chair, the guards standing over me — for something like a quarter of an hour. Then a smartly-dressed woman came in. She was about forty, I suppose, and her manner was very brisk and businesslike. 

"Ms Carson," she said. "Please accept my apologies for borrowing you in this manner." 

"What do you want?" I asked. 

"A quiet word with you and your lawyer. She's a difficult woman to get hold of, as I'm sure you know. Never in the office when I call." 

I looked at her with new interest. "You're with FaloCorp?" 

"I'm a contractor, Ms Carson. The name of my employer is confidential." 

I was positive it was FaloCorp — after all, they were the only ones who thought Zoë's surname was Compline. But if it was them, I couldn't see why they'd go to all this trouble over Zoë's half-baked legal threats. 

"Then I don't think I ought to say anything," I said, trying to cooperate without giving anything away. "I might agree to anything without Ms Compline checking it." 

Ms Thring smiled. "I wouldn't be at all surprised. Shall we walk and talk?" 

It didn't look like I had much of a choice; the guards were already pulling me upright. We retraced our footsteps, and before long were back at the lobby. One of the guards was still standing by the T-Mat. 

"Has she come back this way?" Ms Thring asked. 

"Not a sign of her," the guard replied. 

"Make sure she doesn't slip through," Ms Thring said, and led me out again into the landscaped area between the towers. The carnival was still going on, and the crowd around the tower had only increased; not only were there a lot more people queuing up to be vetted by the guards on the T-Mat, but the floats Zoë and I had seen above the canal were gliding in our direction, and people had gathered to watch them, too. 

Ms Thring pressed a button on her sleeve, and a microphone extended from her collar. 

"Your attention, please," she said, her voice echoing across the carnival. Some people turned to look, though the entertainers kept going with their acts. "Kate Compline, you are required at Lexington B-3 block. Repeat, Kate Compline to Lexington B-3 block. Your client is anxious to see you." 

She waited for an answer. After five minutes, she repeated her message, and kept on waiting. Before she could repeat again, I caught sight of Zoë's cream-coloured overcoat again, as she emerged from the throng. 

"I'm pleased to see you're being so sensible," Ms Thring said, as her uniformed men surrounded Zoë. "Where is it?" 

Zoë looked baffled. "Where's what?" 

"Don't play games with me, Compline. You stole it and you brought it here to sell it. Or have you sold it already? If it's not on you we'll tear this place apart." 

"I still haven't got the faintest idea what you're talking about," Zoë said. 

"Neither do I," I said, though they weren't paying me the slightest attention. 

"Search her!" Ms Thring snapped. 

Two men caught hold of Zoë by the arms. As a third approached her, there was suddenly a dull _thud_ of wood against flesh, and he stumbled. Then, with a similar noise, something smacked into the guard next to me. It took me a moment to realise that there were clowns all around us, and their hitting-people-with-planks skills weren't just for show. While Ms Thring's attention — and her guards' — was on Zoë, they must have crept up and surrounded them. Which can't be easy for people in multicoloured costumes with orange wigs, but they managed it somehow. 

"Team Two to base, request—" Ms Thring was saying. But before she could get further, a custard pie hit her in the face and she couldn't do anything except splutter. 

"Run!" Zoë shouted. 

I broke free from the guards, who were by now definitely outnumbered by the clowns and fighting a losing battle. Zoë seemed to take a little longer to realise what was happening, but by the time I'd reached the tower she was right behind me. 

The squad guarding the T-Mat were still there, and without giving myself time to think I threw myself at the first open grav-tube I saw. Zoë dived in beside me; as I hit the button and the doors slammed closed, I could see guards running towards the tubes after us. Then we were shooting upwards, floors zipping past us in a blur. 

We stumbled out of the grav-tube into an anonymous lobby. Three corridors, at one-twenty degree angles, led away. They were ruler-straight, with nowhere to hide. If we'd run along them, we'd have been obvious. And if we got to the far end, there wouldn't be anything there except flats we couldn't get into. 

The lights above all the other grav-tubes were lit now, counting down the seconds until more guards arrived on this floor. 

"We're trapped," I said. If I'd been thinking more clearly I should have pressed the button for street level, not some random high floor, but there was no point saying so now. 

Zoë grabbed my hand. "Emergency stairs." 

We headed for an emergency door. As we pushed it open, alarms went off all the way up and down the tower; it would be all too obvious where we were. We set off anyway, but we'd barely got two flights down before we could hear the sound of people coming down after us. And coming up from below. 

"It's no good," I said, leaning against the wall and trying to catch my breath. 

Zoë glared at me. "What are you going to do, play Patience and wait for them to come and arrest you?" 

"We can't get out." I lowered my voice. The footsteps above and below were slowing; they knew we were surrounded. "It's simple logic." 

"Logic only works if your premises are correct." Zoë delved in the pocket of her trenchcoat and pulled out a grey cylinder. There were wires attached to it, that trailed back to her pocket. I recognised it as another of the parts I'd removed from the Gundan robot. 

"This is a long shot," Zoë whispered. "But it's the only one we've got. Hold onto it and don't let go for anything."


	13. Future Echoes

> _**Zoë:** I remember everything — and I remember nothing_  
>    — Big Finish Doctor Who, _Companion Chronicles_ passim. 

**Extract from Lily Carson's diary: Thursday 27 May**

As instructed, I took hold of the cylinder. Zoë, still holding it in her left hand, slipped her right hand into her pocket. 

The footsteps were at the turn of the stairs above us now; unhurried, confident. 

The cylinder flared with light — a blazing, white light that seemed to shine through the stairs and the tower walls as if they were glass. In that glare, everything faded from sight except Zoë and me; we were alone, surrounded by featureless white infinity. The sound of approaching footsteps was gone; I couldn't hear anything except my own breathing, and Zoë's. 

"What happened?" I asked. There was no reply; I turned to see Zoë, staring straight ahead with a haunted expression. 

" _I've been here before_ ," she whispered. 

"Zoë!" 

"Lily." With what seemed to be an immense effort, she turned her head towards me. "We mustn't get separated." 

"Where are we?" I asked. 

"I don't know. A dimension about which we know nothing." Zoë still sounded distant. "Maybe it's just a — a corridor the Gundan passes through to get from A to B. Not a real place in itself." She did a little jump. "It's got gravity. And air." 

"And light," I said. The light seemed to be coming from all around us; we weren't casting any shadows. "Is this thing we're holding a time machine?" 

"I'm not sure. But it's definitely part of the equipment the Gundan used to get around." She looked down at the glowing cylinder. "That little thing's got a complete self-contained teleportation system in there. With our best technology it would take a building full of equipment. And it was built by slaves, in secret, using parts from a spares bin. Space knows what the Shadow Market, or You-Know-Who, or those people this evening might pay for it." 

"Or who they'd kill to get their hands on it," I added soberly. 

Zoë nodded. "I know. So you see how important it is that we keep this secret." She looked around suddenly, and stiffened. "Did you see that?" 

I looked around the endless whiteness. "Where?" 

"There!" Zoë pointed. There was something black in the remote distance, or maybe a tiny figure right in front of us — perspective was tricky in this place. It was walking, or perhaps marching, across the endless sea of white. Afterimages trailed behind it. 

"Another Gundan?" I asked. 

"Possibly. But..." Zoë screwed up her eyes. "I keep thinking there's something else. Something at the back of my mind I can't reach..." She clutched her head. "One year when I was at infant school, they did 'Reason' for the Enlightenment Play. Were you there then?" 

"Yes: I was in Year Three. I was one of the robots. 'There is no Master but the Master and QT-1 is his prophet.'" 

Zoë shivered. "That's the one. I'm not sure, but it reminds me of one of the robots from the play." 

"But it can't be, can it?" 

"We don't know anything about this dimension," Zoë repeated. "Maybe everything we're seeing is just our minds trying to make sense of something that they can't process." 

"So it's all just an illusion?" I rubbed my eyes. I was beginning to see shapes resolving themselves out of the whiteness, little dancing translucent specks, but they wouldn't stay still. 

"Possibly not. Maybe there's reality behind it, just not a reality we can perceive." 

"Why don't we follow it?" I suggested. "See where it's going." 

Zoë shrugged. "Why not? As long as we don't get too close to it. There aren't any briar patches for us to hide in this time." 

"All very well for you to joke about it. You weren't the one who fell in." 

We marched into the endless white void, trying to angle our path to follow the robot — if it was a robot. It took us a few goes to be sure we were actually heading towards it, rather than away. Our footsteps didn't make any sound, and I found myself constantly glancing over my shoulder to see if anything was following us. 

After we'd been walking for a while, I thought I saw something ahead of us. At first it looked like a dead spider, lying on its back with its legs curled up, but as we approached it got bigger and bigger until it was towering over us: a twisted tangle of blackened metal beams, that might once have been the skeleton of a building. A little way beyond them was an arched stone doorway. It was surrounded by shattered walls and heaps of rubble, as if it was all that was left of a much larger structure. The arch itself was entirely filled with a mirror. 

By now, we were quite close to the marching figure, and it was clearly another Gundan. Without paying the slightest attention to the ruins, it marched straight into the mirror, and disappeared. The surface of the mirror rippled for a moment, and then went still again. 

"Did that... Did that thing just walk through the mirror?" I asked. 

"I think we've got to assume it did," Zoë said. "I told you, we've no idea how anything works in this dimension." 

We picked our way through the debris until we were standing face to face with the mirror. Cautiously, I reached out and touched it; it was cold to the touch, solid and unyielding. Then we walked around the doorway. On the other side was another mirror, or the back of the same one, and just as solid. 

I looked around the ruins and the blackened wreckage, and shivered. "Something terrible must have happened here." 

"If we get back to reality in one piece we can ask our Gundan's AI if it knows what happened," Zoë said. She looked at her wristwatch. "I think we've got about three hundred seconds before the automatic return function kicks in." 

"Automatic return function?" 

"Yes, it should reverse the transfer that brought us here. I set a time limit of one thousand nine hundred and thirty-two seconds." 

I stared at her. "Why? I mean, why that figure?" 

"Because I thought it might be dangerous to remain here any longer." 

"But... did you calculate it or something?" 

"No," Zoë's voice said. Except it wasn't quite Zoë's voice, and Zoë's mouth wasn't moving. "I remembered it." 

We jumped, and looked around. There was nobody to be seen anywhere; we were all alone, the tangle of metal behind us and the mirror in front of us. But now, reflected in the mirror, along with Zoë and me, was another, much older Zoë, old enough that her hair was grey. She was wearing a shapeless orange boiler suit with black stencil markings, and her face was set in a grim expression. 

"Who are you?" I began. 

"I'd have thought that was obvious, even to you, Lily," she retorted. "My name is Zoë Heriot: I believe you're familiar with it." 

"You're claiming to be a future version of me?" Zoë said. 

The older Zoë shook her head. "No, I'm stating it." 

"Then what's the word I'm thinking of right—" 

"Halfarjump-six-nine-eight-four." 

Zoë swallowed. "All right. What are you doing here?" 

"I don't think I am here. As far as I'm concerned I'm in a cell on Death Row, and this is a dream or hallucination. Probably caused by the mind scanner they're using — the state of the art's advanced considerably since my young day. They're trying to bypass the block on my memory by digging up strong emotions. And what could be more emotional for you than seeing your own future?" 

"What block on your memory?" Zoë asked. 

" _Our_ memory. You've already got it — but you won't remember me telling you this. As well as blocking whatever it is it's supposed to block, it blocks any knowledge of itself. The moment they stop interrogating me I'll forget the whole thing, you just wait and see." She folded her arms. "And you _will_ see." 

"You said you're on Death Row," I said. "What happened?" 

"I was framed." It sounded like she was running through a familiar story that she'd told several times before. "Causing too much trouble to too many high-ups, I suppose. Or maybe it's what's in here." She tapped her head. "I've had a couple of stays of execution when they thought they could get past the block and suck out something useful. Maybe they did, and that's why they haven't disintegrated me already." 

"Who's got you imprisoned?" I asked. 

"They call themselves the Company. You can see how much imagination they've got — they can't even think of a proper name for their business. And there's nothing original about their plans, either. Own the entire Solar System and run it as a monopoly for their shareholders. I give the operation five years at most before it falls apart under the weight of its own incompetence. Of course, that's quite long enough for it to execute me." 

"There's got to be some way we can stop this happening," I said. 

"If you try, you'll probably bring it about. Isn't that how stable time loops work?" The expression on her face was bleak. "Of course, if you do manage to change the timeline, I'll cease to exist anyway, won't I? Disintegration or butterfly effect, it's all the same to me. 

"Would you like some proof? For you, it's the night of Thursday the twenty-seventh of May. Correct?" 

Zoë nodded. "Correct." 

"On Saturday the twenty-ninth, you will both be with Rafael Chang when he's shot and ends up in a coma. Try and stop it. You won't be able to, even now I've told you." 

"How can you be so—" I began. 

She shook her head. "Because I remember standing beside you and hearing all this. And I couldn't save Rafael. I know exactly what happened and it'll all happen just the same to you." 

"Where and when will he be shot?" Zoë asked. 

"By a sniper, in Lower Gooch Street, at 2:32 in the afternoon local ti—" 

In the middle of the word she was saying, she vanished. I hardly had time for a "What..." before the device in Zoë's hand chimed once, and the light in it died. As it faded, so did the mirror, the gateway, and the whole of the void. Bare concrete walls shimmered into view around us, and quickly became fully solid. There was a row of waste recycling pods in front of us. The place was lit by the cold white glare of LED streetlamps. 

"What happened to her — you know, the older you?" I asked. I was feeling faint, and had to lean against the wall behind me for support. "She was just talking to us and then she disappeared." 

"She said she was dreaming." Zoë looked pale and strained, too, though she was managing to keep upright. "Perhaps she woke up." 

"Or perhaps it's to do with whatever she said about a sniper? If we can stop the sniper, then that changes the timeline, and she isn't your future any more." 

"Maybe." Zoë rested her head against the side of one of the pods. "Closed timelike curves make my head hurt." She grimaced, as if noticing the smell of refuse for the first time. "I wonder where we are, anyway." 

"We must still be in London, mustn't we?" I could hear the note of worry in my own voice. "It would make sense if we've moved by the distance we walked in the other dimension, wouldn't it?" 

"I don't know." Zoë put her hand to her head. "I don't know if this is the same city, or the same night, or the same Universe." 

"We'd better get out of here and find out, then," I said. 

The only way out of the little courtyard we were in was through a pair of gates, which turned out to be locked. If someone climbed up on one of the recycling pods it would be possible to get over the gates, but when we tried we found we were still too weak and giddy to manage it. 

"Who's Rafael Chang?" I asked, as we waited for the ringing in our ears to go away. 

"A solicitor," Zoë said. "He works for FaloCorp. We've had a couple of case conferences. I think he might be sweet on me," she added, matter-of-factly. 

"Has he asked you out?" 

"Yes: we're going to meet at a bar he knows tomorrow. If tomorrow is still tomorrow." 

I patted Zoë on the back. "Good luck, then." 

"Thank you, Lily. But I feel rotten about the whole situation. I'm using him to get information on FaloCorp. And if that... that _image_ was right, it's going to get him killed. Do you remember what I said when I took you to the University?" 

"When you said you hoped you could bring yourself to sacrifice someone's life if it would save others?" 

"That's it. I might be sacrificing his life just to satisfy my curiosity. I've got no idea whether it _will_ save any other lives." 

"It mightn't happen at all," I said. "Remember that old prophet man said predictions were guidelines, not fixed." 

"What we saw was hardly one of his predictions," Zoë said gloomily. "Come on, let's have another go at getting out of here." 

This time, we managed to get onto the pod, and over the gate. There was a public T-Mat booth just up the road, and we teleported home. It turned out we had returned to London, just as we'd hoped, and it was the same night. I couldn't see that anything else had changed, either, so it's probably the same Universe, too. I hope so, anyway.


	14. Lower Gooch Street

> _If we believe a thing to be bad, and if we have a right to prevent it, it is our duty to try to prevent it and damn the consequences._  
>    — Lord Milner 

**Extract from Lily Carson's diary: Friday 28 May**

I was just about to go to bed when I got a video call from Zoë. She looked as if she'd just got in from her date, but she didn't waste any time on telling me about that. 

"Lily," she said. "We need to make our plans for tomorrow." 

"You mean making sure Mr Chang doesn't get shot?" I said. 

Zoë nodded. "I've no idea if what we saw in the mirror was any sort of message from the future. If I can stop Rafael getting shot, that proves the future isn't fixed. And I don't want to see an innocent man shot, of course." 

"Suppose we don't go to Upper Gooch Street? You-from-the-future said we'd both be there, didn't she?" 

" _Lower_ Gooch Street," Zoë said. "And you're right, if we weren't there that wouldn't match what we were told. But Rafael would still go there and get shot." 

"So... can you get him not to go?" 

"No, I can't." Zoë sighed. "It's my own fault. I said I was suspicious that there might be some sort of high-up corruption in FaloCorp." 

"Well, there is, isn't there?" I said. "They must be the ones who sent that Thring woman after us." 

"Yes, but that's not the point. Now he's got this idea about corruption in his head, he's going to poke around and try and find evidence for it. He said the place to look would be the Urquhart Square office." 

"Is that near Lower Gooch Street?" 

"Just round the corner." She clutched her head. "I can't change his mind and I can't change where the office is. There's no easy way out." 

"So... he's going to be there, and we need to make sure he doesn't get shot. Can't we try to catch the sniper?" 

"I thought of that. But that would mean searching every building in range, including the one he'll be coming out of. And if I could get in there, I wouldn't need his help to search it in the first place." 

"Can we protect him? Get him to wear a bulletproof vest?" 

"They'd probably use a laser, and aim for his head. But that's an idea, Lily. It might be possible to do something with a force field." She looked to one side, presumably checking information on another screen. "I'm not sure if there's enough time to set up anything very elaborate, but it's certainly worth trying." 

"I think you need to talk to You-Know-Who about this," I said. "They could get you force field generators and search all the buildings. And give Mr Chang an armed guard." 

"If they believed me. And I'd have to tell them how I knew." Zoë shook her head flatly. "That means I'd have to tell them about the Gundan and everything. I daren't risk it." 

"Have you tried to go back to that... dimension, or whatever it was, and see if you can find out any more?" 

"I can't. The control circuits are burned out. I can repair them, but it'll take a few days. I think that must be why the Gundan had so many replicated circuits — so it could take the damage from multiple jumps and keep going." 

"So the only thing we can try is the force field generator?" 

"I've got one other idea," Zoë said. "I could send an anonymous tipoff to the police that there's a threat of a shooting near Lower Gooch Street. Maybe having the police there will make a difference. Do you have any other suggestions?" 

I shook my head. "None." 

"OK. Good night, then, Lily." 

"Wait!" I said. "What time do you want me there tomorrow?" 

Zoë looked taken aback. "You don't have to come just because the prediction says you'll be there. If you stay away then at least we can falsify that part of it." 

"I don't care about that," I said. "You need me there." 

"I suppose I can't stop you coming," Zoë said. "Twenty past two, local time, then." 

⁂

**Extract from Lily Carson's diary: Saturday 29 May**

I met Zoë at Lower Gooch Street, at twenty past two. Zoë looked as if she hadn't slept at all last night — her hair was a mess and there were shadows under her eyes. She was wearing the same grubby jumpsuit that she'd worn when we dug up the Gundan, and she was holding what looked like a remote control of some kind. 

When I'd been picturing the situation the night before, I'd imagined an empty street with just the three of us there: Zoë, Mr Chang, and me. But of course, it wasn't like that at all. There were groups of people passing by all the time, and we only got occasional glimpses across the square to where the offices were. 

"Have you heard from Mr Chang?" I asked. 

"No, but I saw him when he went in," Zoë said. "That was about three hours ago. I don't think he saw me." She lowered her voice. "I've got the force field generators set up." 

I nodded at the control in her hand. "That's what that's for?" 

"Correct." 

We fell silent. I tried not to look at my watch, but I could still feel the minutes and seconds counting down. I suppose I could have turned away and walked off at any time. I wanted to be there for Zoë, of course, in case the worst happened, but there was more to it than that. It felt almost as if the weight of destiny was keeping me fixed to the spot. 

Zoë suddenly caught hold of my hand. "There." 

I'd hardly noticed the stocky, smartly-dressed figure slip out of the office opposite. I don't know whether Zoë had told him to expect snipers, or whether he was just being cautious off his own bat, but he was moving rapidly and obliquely, zigzagging between groups of passers-by. As he got closer, Zoë's grip on my hand slowly tightened. 

"And... now!" she whispered. 

Mr Chang had just appeared round the corner, about a dozen paces from us. There was a click from the device in Zoë's hand, and a translucent blue membrane swept across the road immediately behind him. Two more appeared on either side of the road; I looked over my shoulder, to see that another had closed off the road behind us. When I looked up, I could see that the sky was covered, too. We were sealed away from the world in a force-field box. So were a lot of other people, of course — some of them couldn't stop in time and bumped into the force fields as they appeared in front of them. 

As the force fields snapped into place around us, Zoë ran forward, dodging between bewildered pedestrians, and hurried up to Mr Chang. 

"The evidence you were looking for," she said. "Did you find it?" 

"Kate!" He looked startled out of his wits to see her. "What's going—" 

There was a sharp _crack_ noise. The force field immediately behind his head flared with light for a second. I looked at my watch — it was 14:32. 

"That was it," I said. "Wasn't it?" 

"I think so." Zoë cast the briefest of glances out into the square. The people who'd been crowding round the force field had scattered, trying to get away from whoever had fired the shot. Security men were hurrying up, too, some of them armed. She turned back to Mr Chang. 

"That shot was meant for you," she said. "What did you find? Quickly!" 

Mr Chang looked shaken, as well he might. "I found the file," he said. "But I couldn't take a copy: the system's locked down. It's worse than you thought, Kate. There are at least three directors who've been compromised. Rinara, Baldwin, and Orthez." 

"Compromised how?" 

Another flash of light hit the force field. I wondered how many it could stand up to. 

"Travsol. It's an alien life-extension device—" 

"Enough," a voice said, behind me. I recognised it at once, and spun round to find myself face to face with the redheaded policewoman. Just as before, the centurion was standing beside her. 

"Who are you?" Zoë asked. She'd turned, too, to face them. "What do you want?" 

Neither answered. Instead, slowly, the centurion reached up and lifted the helmet from his head. In precise synchronisation, the policewoman took her hat off. The two straightened, as if coming to attention. 

Then, still in unison, their heads began to rotate, revealing that at the back they were concave and silvery. It was as if the back halves of their skulls had been surgically removed and replaced by radio dishes. The rotation slowed and stopped, leaving the heads facing backwards and the dishes facing towards us. I found I couldn't move, couldn't even look round; I was staring like a rabbit in headlights at those two metallic ovals, surrounded by hypnotic, pulsating flickers. 

I kept staring, pinned to the spot, until after the two figures' heads had rotated back to their right position. Whoever and whatever they were, they replaced their headgear, walked unhurriedly to a maintenance hatch in the road, opened it, and climbed down out of view. There was nobody to stop them; Zoë and I were still recovering from whatever they'd done to paralyse us, and no-one else inside the force field was rushing to help. I could see security men on the outside of the force field, but they couldn't get in, only watch as the centurion and policewoman escaped under their noses. 

The hatch closed. With a flash and a crackle the forcefield went out, and security men were rushing up, dragging us across the street, trying to get us out of the sniper's line of fire. 

But the sniper wouldn't need to fire again. Rafael Chang was lying on the pavement, motionless, his eyes closed. 

I looked down at my watch. It was 14:35.


	15. Hotel California

> _Ale, man, ale's the stuff to drink  
>  For fellows whom it hurts to think._  
>   — A. E. Housman, _A Shropshire Lad_

_"We were called in, of course," the Colonel said. "I won't say Dr Heriot told us the whole story, but she told us a reasonable subset. Enough to give us an idea of what had been going on. And she passed on Mr Chang's statement about FaloCorp and its compromised directors. We instructed her to leave the investigation up to us."_

_Alison was staring into space, as if the holographic record she'd witnessed was still playing. "Lily said they turned into robots. Does that mean the Last Centurion and Amelia Pond were robots the whole time?"_

_"I can't speak for every time they've been seen," the Colonel said. "In this situation it's clear that they were robots, so it's almost certain the two people Ms Carson saw at the Ingomar Centre were the same two robots. It explains certain features of that episode."_

_"You mean how they got there?"_

_"Robots of this type — the informal term for them is 'spoonheads' — project their appearance holographically. They no doubt arrived in the character of ordinary visitors, switched to the shapes you saw here, took part in the events related by Ms Carson, and changed their appearance again to leave. Spoonheads also have extensive electronic warfare capabilities; this enabled them to counteract the Centre's force fields and surveillance systems."_

_"They sound dangerous," Alison said._

_"In the wrong hands, they are. What is more worrying, Ms Swift, is that as far as we know all existing spoonheads are in protected government and military facilities. Thorough audits have been performed, and at the time of the events you saw, all known spoonheads were secure in their respective storage areas."_

_"So these two are something new?"_

_"Precisely. Somebody — some unknown party — was able to obtain these devices, and is prepared to use them."_

_"Where do they come from? Originally?"_

_"That's classified information. But there's no chance of anybody else having a copy of the plans, or facilities to build them." The Colonel took Alison's hand in his own. "I believe we now come to your final encounter with Dr Heriot."_

_"You mean you want to put me in that scanner again."_

_"I'm afraid so."_

_Alison hadn't seen him make any obvious sign, but the T-Mat in the corner of the room activated, and the Major materialised within it._

_"All right." Alison squared her shoulders. "I'm ready."_

⁂

**Extract from Lily Carson's diary: Sunday 30 May**

After everything that happened yesterday, I slept till quite late. When I did wake up, I was half-expecting to see a missed message from Zoë, but there wasn't. I tried to catch up with a few tasks, but found I kept breaking off what I was doing and checking my messages. After lunch I sent Zoë a message of my own asking how she was, but I didn't get any answer. 

It wasn't till evening that a message came in, and then it wasn't from Zoë. It was from Alison. 

"Lily!" she said. "I can't get hold of Zoë. She isn't answering her messages." 

"I can't either," I said. "Maybe she's out." 

"But she promised she'd be in! We were going to go through my latest research on the Sarkad disappearances." 

My unease, which had been steadily building all day, crystallised. 

"Meet me at her flat," I said. 

In less than five minutes I was at Zoë's door. Alison was already there, looking on edge, her freckles standing out against her pale, nervous face. I tried to keep myself calm and remember the entry code. It took me a couple of goes, my hands slipping nervously on the control panel, before I managed to find the right combination. Thank Fortuna Zoë didn't change it after I was there before. The door slid open. The lights were dimly on, and old-time music was playing — I didn't recognise the singer, or the words. 

_There she stood in the doorway; / I heard the mission bell..._

"Zoë?" Alison called. There was no answer. 

_And I was thinking to myself / "This could be Heaven or this could be Hell"..._

I fumbled for the light controls and turned the lights up to full. The flat wasn't anything like as tidy as when I'd been in it before. Now there were bits of circuitry scattered about, and half-finished drawings, and plastic cups. Compared to my flat it probably still looked quite neat, but by Zoë's standards the place was a complete tip. 

_Then she lit up a candle and she showed me the way..._

We found Zoë behind the first door we tried. She was sprawled on a sofa, wearing what looked like a sleeping suit. There were more cups scattered around, with traces of clear liquid in them. The whole room reeked of alcohol. 

"Zoë!" I bent over her. "Can you hear me?" 

_Welcome to the Hotel California / Such a lovely place (Such a lovely place) / Such a lovely face..._

Zoë groaned, and opened her eyes. "Go away," she said. Her voice was slurred and she was staring into space. "Three minutes. I did ever'thing I could and that's the only diff'rence I made. Go away." 

_Her mind is Tiffany-twisted, she got the Mercedes bends..._

"What in space have you been doing?" Alison tried to get her to sit up, but she just flopped back down. Another pouch of brownish liquid fell out of her hand. "Where did you even get this stuff?" 

"Doesn't matter." Zoë gazed vacantly around. "Nothing matters. There's no way out." 

_How they dance in the courtyard, sweet summer sweat / Some dance to remember, some dance to forget..._

She broke off, and began to hiccup. 

"Alison!" I shouted. "Get a bin or something. Now!" 

_So I called up the Captain, 'Please bring me my wine' / He said, 'We haven't had that spirit here since nineteen sixty nine'..._

Alison dived for the waste-paper bin, but Zoë had already started vomiting by the time she got back with it. We did the best we could to help her; I held Zoë's hair back and tried to keep her mouth pointing at the bin, and Alison tried to keep the bin in the right place. And we both tried not to throw up ourselves. It seemed to go on for ever. 

_Mirrors on the ceiling, / The pink champagne on ice / And she said 'We are all just prisoners here, of our own device'..._

"Shall... Shall I find something to clean up with?" Alison asked, once Zoë had finally finished retching and collapsed over my knees. 

"Please," I said. "And get her some water." 

Alison hurried away. I rubbed Zoë's back, for what good that did. 

_Last thing I remember, I was running for the door..._

Alison hurried back, with a cup of water, which she handed to me. I tried to get Zoë to drink some. 

_I had to find the passage back / To the place I was before..._

"And can you turn that horrible music off?" I asked. It was really getting on my nerves by now. 

"Got it." 

_'Relax,' said the night man, 'We are programmed to receive. / You can check-out any time you like, But you can never—'_

There was a click from the direction of the comms panel, and the recorded voice finally shut down. 

"What have you been doing?" I asked. 

Zoë didn't answer. 

I sighed. "Let's get you cleaned up." 

Between us, we got her to brush her teeth, change into a fresh sleeping suit, and go to bed. Once we were sure she was sound asleep, we tried to clean up the rest of the mess as best we could. 

"If we hadn't been here..." Alison said, flopping down onto the sofa. She looked pale and drained, and I'm sure I did too. 

"I know." 

"Lily, how did she do it? The food machines won't let you synthesize alcohol in those quantities." 

"She probably hacked one and bypassed the safeties. Or maybe she actually fermented it the old-style way. But that, my dear Alison, isn't the question you should be asking." 

Alison looked puzzled. "I don't get you." 

"You should be asking why she did it. She's an Elite — conditioned for mental stability. What on Earth could make her want to drink herself to— well, drink far more than she ought?" 

"Why, then?" Alison must have seen something in my expression. "Lily, what do you know?" 

There wasn't time to tell her everything that happened when we went to the Shadow Market, but I gave her edited highlights. I also told her something of what happened when we tried to save Mr Chang the next day. 

"You see what it must be like for her," I said, once I'd finished. "It looks as if what we saw really was something from Zoë's future. She was set on disproving it. She thought if she could change what happened today, that would prove the future wasn't fixed. And she couldn't change it. Not significantly. It happened at 2:35 rather than 2:32, but Mr Chang ended up in a coma just the same." 

"It sounds almost like someone knew she'd try to change history," Alison said. "And they sent those two people — or robots, or whatever they were — to change it back." She paused briefly. "You said one of them looked like a centurion?" 

"That's right." 

Alison swallowed. "That's bad." 

"Why?" 

"Did Zoë ever talk to you about my Research?" Alison asked, and I could hear the capital R. 

"I don't think so." I thought back. "It was to do with fairies, or something, wasn't it? Not time travel." 

"I'm not sure what's behind it any more." Alison was getting twitchier by the minute. "Lily, before I tell you, I need you to understand something. This is dangerous information. If the government — or the people behind them — find out, they may act against you. Do you still want me to tell you?" 

"Yes, I do." The whole thing sounded like grade-A conspiracy theory nonsense to me. 

"OK. I'm researching a man— well, an entity that looks like a man. No-one really knows who he is or what he looks like. But any time there's something the least bit Fortean going on, you can bet he'll be there." 

"That sounds just like 'Rogue Psi'," I said. "Did you ever see that?" 

Alison's face reddened. "You think I've made all this up from daft movie plots," she said. "Well, I haven't. This is serious and it's real and I've seen the evidence. This man — the Ragged Man — shows up when there's real trouble and he offers you a bargain. He'll deal with the trouble, but maybe he'll take someone in return. Someone young and pretty, for preference. Sometimes they come back... a lot of times they don't. And if they do come back, they're not always the same. As if something's been taken from them. 

"I've been through a lot of cases trying to work out which ones fit the pattern. Florence Croft — the dairymaid I mentioned before — I'm sure she was one of them. Amelia Pond was another. The Ragged Man took her on her wedding night. She came back, but ten years later she disappeared again. Permanently. Then there's Claudia Marwood—" 

"Hang on," I said. "You mean this Ragged Man's been around for two hundred years or more?" 

Alison nodded. "He can't be human. Not a normal human, anyway. That's one reason why I thought he was one of the Fair Folk. You know those stories where the fairies do a favour and take the village's prettiest daughter in payment? Maybe that's what he is. Or maybe all the stories about fairies are because of him." She looked at my expression, and hurried on. "Or he could be an alien. Zoë says you've encountered aliens." 

"Sort of." The reptile people weren't strictly aliens, but they were close enough to what Alison meant. "Why do you call him the Ragged Man?" 

"That's what Amelia Pond called him. She was a published author, but if she ever wrote anything about him it hasn't survived — or it was suppressed. But a few years ago an archive of an old social media site turned up, and there were some posts mentioning her. Jokes about her 'imaginary friend' — and then a picture of her with him." Alison's voice was hushed, as if she was describing the Holy Grail. "He looked so young. And his clothes all torn." 

I was half-believing her by that point, leaning forward to catch each word. It doesn't sound anything like as convincing now I'm writing it down, but the point is how it felt then. 

"So the thing is, I've read up enough cases to get a feel for when the Ragged Man's involved." Alison looked nervously around the flat, as if expecting men in black to jump out and grab her. "And. Um. I think he's involved with what's happening now. With Zoë." 

"Why do you say that?" 

"Well, it's—" Alison broke off, and seemed to be trying to get her thoughts in order. "Can we use Zoë's comms panel? I want to access some files." 

The comms panel was showing half-a-dozen missed calls, including the ones from Alison and me. But Alison ignored those, brought up the archive search screen, and spent several minutes connecting to obscure datastores I'd never heard of and typing in passwords. Eventually she sat back and pointed triumphantly at the picture she'd unearthed: a statuesque redhead, in old-fashioned police uniform. I wouldn't have been able to swear to it, but she looked very much like the policewoman I'd seen at the Ingomar Tower, and in Lower Gooch Street. 

I told Alison as much, and asked who the woman was. 

"That's Amelia Pond." Alison paged to another image: the same woman, in an antiquated wedding dress, standing with her new husband. There was someone else's hand on her other arm, but whoever it was had been cropped out of the shot. "This is her on the day she disappeared — when the Ragged Man took her." 

"And you think he sent her this time? Or a robot that looked like her?" I thought about this. "But you said if he's involved then there's real trouble." 

"Yes." Alison shivered. "You said Mr Chang had found out something horrible was going on at FaloCorp. I think it's something big. Big enough that the Ragged Man felt the need to step in." 

"Then where is he?" 

"I told you. He could be anyone. You might have met him already and not known it." Alison switched off the comms panel. "I'm sure Zoë has. And I think she's been part of one of his bargains. That he's taken his price from her." 

"Why?" 

"The way she talks, sometimes. As if there's something missing from her life but she doesn't know what it is. It's the same vibe I get from Amelia Pond's books and Florence Croft's lectures." 

"Everyone feels like that from time to time," I said. But I couldn't help thinking of Zoë's nightmares, of the way she'd thrown herself into one dangerous sport after another, of the vision in the mirror and her talk of blocked memories. "If you're right, what can we do?" 

"I don't know." Alison was looking tired, and lost, and very young. "I don't think anyone knows. It's like asking what you can do if you see an avalanche coming your way. Just hang on and hope for the best, I think." 

"Right." I put my hand on her shoulder. "You'd better go home. I'll stay here with Zoë and see how she is tomorrow morning."


	16. Prime Suspect

> _Always suspect everybody._  
>    — Charles Dickens, _The Old Curiosity Shop_

_The Major tapped at the switch, and the mind scanner shut down with a subdued crackle._

_"And that was the last time you saw Dr Heriot?" the Colonel asked._

_Alison, still pinioned in the machine, couldn't so much as nod. "Yes," she whispered._

_"Then thank you, Ms Swift. We shall submit the relevant sections, backed by the appropriate mind scans, to the appropriate enquiries as evidence of Dr Heriot's state of mind."_

_"That's_ it? _You've pulled all that out of my head and now you're just going to let me go?"_

_"You object to that?" the Major asked._

_"I— I want to know what happened out there. And what happened to Mr Chang. And those people who he thought were compromised. I want to know everything."_

_The Colonel smiled. "You feel you've come too far to go back now?"_

_"Yes."_

_At a movement of the Major's hand the restraints slackened, releasing Alison from the mind scanner._

_"Then let's see how much further we can go," the Colonel said._

⁂

**Extract from Lily Carson's diary: Monday 30 May**

I woke up fairly early, and was able to get some sort of breakfast together by the time Zoë surfaced. She had a nasty hangover, which wasn't any sort of surprise, and was keeping her emotions under rigid control. 

"I told you I'd been experimenting with suboptimal decisions," she said, nibbling at a nutrient bar. "That was a pretty dreadful one, wasn't it?" 

"Why did you do it?" I asked. 

"You read about people in the olden days drowning their sorrows. I thought it might be worth a try. And that song... did you recognise it?" 

"No." 

" _Hotel California_ , by the Eagles. I was listening to it earlier and it... it triggered some sort of emotional reaction. You remember what my future self said about using strong emotions to bypass— to bypass—" She blinked, and seemed to lose her place in the sentence. "Anyway, I put the original and every cover version I could find to play on a loop, to see if I could work out why I was getting those feelings." 

"Did you?" 

"No. They just hurt more each time round." She glanced at the timestrip. "Shouldn't you be getting along to work, Lily?" 

"OK," I said. It was true: if I wanted to get to work on time, I'd have to leave pretty much then. "But let me know if there's any more news." 

**Extract from Lily Carson's diary: Wednesday 2nd June**

Zoë called me this evening, and I went round to see her. 

"Apparently You-Know-Who have completed their investigations at FaloCorp," she said. "Or nearly. They want me to visit them on Friday to go through a few outstanding points." 

"So was Mr Chang right about people being compromised?" I asked. 

"Yes. Apparently the first director he mentioned — Rinara — was diagnosed with Encke's Syndrome six months ago. She knew there wasn't anything that could be done — at least, not with current medical knowledge. So she started the Travsol Project." 

"To find a cure?" 

"In a way. She decided to have a team go through FaloCorp's vaults and find anything that might be usable as a cure. It's lucky they didn't end up turning her into a Cyberman— Sorry, I can't talk about Cybermen. But this was nearly as bad." 

"What happened?" 

"They found some kind of alien medical nanotech device. It injects you with nano-robots that rebuild damage to your body. They tried it on mice that had been genetically modified to develop Encke's Syndrome and got reasonable results — given time, they could probably have come up with a safe way of replicating the effect in humans. But Rinara knew she didn't have much time left. She had a full dose of the nanobots, injected directly into her heart." 

"And didn't it work?" 

"It stopped her dying, so in that respect it worked. But the nanobots decided to make other improvements while they were there — in particular, to various aspects of brain functioning. I think she must have had sociopathic tendencies before, but after the nanobots had finished she had enhanced intelligence and risk-assessment skills to go with them. In other words, she knew exactly what she wanted to do, exactly how to do it, and exactly what she could get away with." 

"And the other directors?" 

"Baldwin realised what was happening and had himself treated with the nanobots. He thought if he applied the same process to himself, he'd be smart enough to outthink Rinara. It didn't work out like that; once he'd had the treatment, he decided she had the right idea and joined forces with her. And they applied the treatment to Orthez because he's the chief financial officer and could have got in their way. Anyway, all three of them are in UNISYC custody now." 

"So that's it?" I asked. "Case closed?" 

Zoë looked as if she wanted to say 'yes,' but couldn't bring herself to. "From UNISYC's point of view, very nearly," she said. "There's still one very important thing missing, though. The device itself. As far as anyone can work out, it was stolen from the Ingomar Centre in your presence, and it hasn't shown up since. They won't be happy until they get their hands on it." 

I looked at her; she was perched on the edge of the sofa, looking down into her mug of tea. 

"What about your point of view?" I said. "Is that the only thing you need to close the case?" 

Zoë took a drink of the tea before she answered. "No," she admitted. "I'm sure there's some other factor I haven't accounted for yet. UNISYC only became involved because of what Mr Chang uncovered: correct?" 

"Correct." 

"And he only started digging because I was pretending to be your lawyer." 

"Yes." 

"And that was only because you were present at the burglary." 

I spotted the next link in the chain myself. "And I was only present because someone sent me the token to be there." 

"Exactly. Whoever sent you the token set this whole thing up." 

"But they couldn't have known everything else that would happen!" I protested. "What if UNISYC had come up with some other identity for you, instead of a lawyer? What if we hadn't escaped from that Thring woman? What if you hadn't had those encryption keys to bargain with?" 

"I know." Zoë looked down into her mug again. "I could only generate those keys because I had the Gundan's probability vector navigator or whatever you want to call it. Only you and Alison knew I had it, and only you knew what it can do." 

"Are you saying it was me?" On the face of it the idea was preposterous, but it wouldn't be the first time I've been mind-controlled into helping criminal gangs. 

"I considered you as prime suspect, of course," Zoë said, with unconcerned detachment. "But even with knowledge that I could break encryption keys, you couldn't possibly have predicted everything else." 

"Even if I'd used that probability vector navigator thing?" I said. "But you had that, not me." 

"That's true. I haven't ruled myself out. Well, I know I didn't send you the token. And if I knew about funny goings-on at FaloCorp, I wouldn't have needed to stage a burglary, pretend to be your lawyer, get to know Rafael and have him find out what I already knew. I could just have gone to UNISYC straight away." 

I nodded. "I didn't really think it could be you. But who is it, then?" 

Zoë didn't answer directly. "You and Alison were looking up pictures on my comms panel the other day," she said. "I presume trying to identify the policewoman and the centurion." 

"Yes. Alison thought they were these people who lived in the 'Tens..." 

"Amelia Pond and Rory Williams. They're all part of her Ragged Man theory." Zoë took another sip of tea. "I've got a nasty feeling she might be onto something. Maybe her Ragged Man is the one behind all this." She set down her mug and leaned back in her chair. "Let's try and reconstruct his actions." 

"OK. He sent me the token." 

"From which we can deduce: He already suspected something was going on there, and he wanted to bring it to your attention. Perhaps he picked you because you're connected with UNISYC." 

"But why me and not you? You've done much more with them than I have." 

"If he had picked me, maybe we'd be asking the question the other way round." Zoë half-closed her eyes. "Next, he sends in those two robots — let's call them Amelia and Rory, after the people they were modelled on — to get you to the storeroom." 

"We don't know they were robots, that time." 

"I think we can be pretty sure they were. Remember you said the drone fired a dart at them and it just bounced off? You thought it had hit Rory's armour, but it was Amelia who was in front. She'd have been the bigger target, and she wasn't wearing armour. Anyway, they get away with the healing device and... it completely disappears. I was positive they'd hidden it in the drone when they sent it to London, but when I asked at the Shadow Market they said there wasn't anything extra in the drone." 

"Maybe he was at the market and got to the drone before they did?" 

"That's possible, I suppose." 

"But what happened to Amelia and Rory after they'd left me behind?" 

Zoë opened her eyes again. "I'm not sure. But my guess is that they got their haul out of the building somehow. The drone, at least, could move under its own power. It wouldn't have the range to get all the way to London, but it could land on a ship, or rendezvous with a blimp. And then Amelia and Rory changed their appearance back to ordinary tourists, and took the T-Mat home in the normal way." 

"So once he'd got the healing device he'd succeeded?" I said. 

"Except that he didn't know who else was affected. And this is where you come in. Through me, you alerted UNISYC and set the enquiries in motion." 

"What if they hadn't done anything? Or suppose Mr Chang hadn't got the idea from you that there was something to investigate?" 

"Then I think the Ragged Man would have given us further hints. Such as having the drone sold at the Shadow Market, so we'd go there and ask questions. That brought Ms Thring to our attention. He must have had those clowns arrange our escape from her, too." 

"You think he was one of the clowns?" 

"It's possible. You don't remember if any of the clowns was a big man with blond hair, do you? I didn't see one like that, but I didn't get a proper look at all of them. You ran off so suddenly I nearly got left behind." 

"But you told me to run." 

"No I didn't." 

"Yes you did, I heard you." 

"It certainly wasn't me — you must have heard someone else and thought it was me." Zoë adopted her 'thoughtful' pose again. "Anyway, we got away." 

"Using bits of the Gundan. He couldn't have foreseen that." 

"No, but if we'd been recaptured he'd have had to engineer some other way of getting us out." 

"That's if he was there at all. We don't have any proof that he was." 

"That's a point. We need to go through all the visual records and see if anyone was present at all three events: the Ingomar Tower, Soho, and Lower Gooch Street. Well, you were, obviously, but anyone else. And while we're on the subject, how do we explain his actions at Lower Gooch Street? He wants the goings-on at FaloCorp to be exposed, so why does he send the robots again and have them shoot Rafael?" 

"You're sure it was them?" 

"No-one else inside the force field could have done it." Zoë looked up at the ceiling. "He sent the robots to silence Rafael, but only after he'd told me the names of the affected people. If I hadn't put the force field up then the sniper would have got Rafael and the robots wouldn't have had to do anything, but he didn't know that. But I don't see why he sent the robots at all." 

"To hear what Mr Chang had discovered," I said. "And then when he'd heard enough, he had them... well, neutralise him. If Alison's right the Ragged Man isn't human — he wouldn't have the same ideas as us about right and wrong." 

Zoë sighed. "It's a theory, and the best one we've come up with so far. But we haven't got any evidence for it." 

"Do you think there's evidence to be found?" 

"Trawl through the visual records and see if we can spot him, I suppose. Or have face recognition software do it." 

"Do it tomorrow," I said. "It's getting late. By the way," I added, as I got to my feet. "Why did you ask if one of the clowns was a big blond man?" 

"Did I?" Zoë asked. 

"Definitely." 

She shook her head. "I don't remember asking that. It seems a funny sort of question." 

I didn't think anything of it at the time, but now I'm writing this I can't help remembering what the Zoë in the mirror said about a memory block — and what Alison had said about Zoë having had dealings with the Ragged Man before. I'm almost willing to bet that Alison's right — and that when Zoë did meet the Ragged Man, he was tall, fair-haired and dressed something like a clown.


	17. Farewell

> _All my life coldly and sadly_  
>  _The days have gone by_  
>  _I who dreamed wildly and madly_  
>  _Am happy to die_  
>      —Epitaph for Emily Georgiana, Lady Winchilsea 

_"Did Zoë come to see you on the Friday?" Alison asked._

_The Colonel nodded. "She did indeed. The meeting was confidential and she didn't give Ms Carson any account of it. But I can give you a précis of it from the notes we took at the time. She certainly didn't discuss this Ragged Man theory of yours with us. Which is a pity, because it looks as if you and she might have been on to something."_

_"A big blond man dressed like a clown," Alison said. "There's a sighting of the Ragged Man that would fit that description. In the last century, at Pease Pottage."_

_"Quite. Anyway, we asked what she knew about the FaloCorp affair, and in particular how she knew that Rafael Chang was going to be attacked. Given our subsequent discoveries in Ms Carson's diary, it seems Dr Heriot wasn't entirely honest with us. She said only that she'd heard rumours about a sniper; she certainly didn't share the source of those rumours."_

_"Would you have believed her if she had?" Alison asked. "If she'd said 'It came from a time mirror in an alternate dimension'?"_

_"We're an open-minded organisation, Ms Swift."_

_"Did Zoë say anything else?"_

_"We discussed the question of the spoonhead robots. She was unaware that we have two in store, and asked to see them. We allowed her to examine them — under constant supervision, of course. Her behaviour gave us no cause for any concern."_

_"And that's it?"_

_"That was the last time anybody here spoke to her. On the following Sunday — the sixth — she and Lily Carson withdrew the maximum amount permitted from their bank accounts, and teleported to the Lunar Docks. Once there, they went aboard the light freighter_ Butterfly _, carrying supplies to Gamma-3 station in orbit around Neptune: a thirty-two day round trip."_

_"Why go so far out?"_

_"We don't know. The alarm was raised almost immediately. Not least because a couple of hours after the_ Butterfly _launched, there was a security breach in the storage area, and the two robots were stolen. They haven't been recovered. Dr Heriot was one of the last people to visit the storage area in question, so we made a routine search for her, and found the bird had flown."_

_"But you found this breakin was_ after _Zoë and Lily were already on board the ship?"_

_"Precisely. Not only on board, but beyond the range of any known teleporter."_

_"But what about those things from the Gundan?" Alison asked. "She still had them with her. She must have done."_

_The Colonel put his hand on her shoulder. "I know what you're thinking, Ms Swift, and it's a very natural deduction. If she'd still had that device, she might have been able to use it to escape from the_ Butterfly _before it was destroyed. But she didn't. It was found at her flat, burnt-out and inoperable, along with the other devices Ms Carson mentions in her diary. All of them were in the same wrecked condition. The same thing had happened to the standard power and data systems in that area of the flat. Our best guess is that they were destroyed by a focused EM burst: the same technique Dr Heriot used when you were fighting the Gundan."_

_"What about Lily? Is there any more in her diary?"_

_"If Ms Carson kept a journal on board the_ Butterfly _, she didn't transmit a copy back to Earth." The Colonel paused, and gave his young prisoner an appraising look. "We hold one other piece of evidence. Before the_ Butterfly _departed Station Gamma-3, Dr Heriot transmitted an encrypted video message — using old-style radio, so it wouldn't arrive until it was all over. The message can only be opened by you."_

_"Can I see it?" Alison asked eagerly._

_"Of course. The question for you is whether you'll allow us to watch it with you."_

_Caught up in the flow of the investigation, Alison answered "Yes" before she was even aware of saying it._

⁂

**Video message transmitted from station Gamma-Three, orbiting Neptune: Monday 21st June**

_[Screen shows Dr Heriot in station Gamma-Three, hydroponics dome. Apparently filmed using a standard portable recorder.]_

Alison, by the time you receive this, I will almost certainly be dead. So will Lily, and so will Captain Fergus of the _Butterfly_. I can't see any other way around it. 

I suppose I'd better start at the beginning. One of the directors of FaloCorp found that she was terminally ill, and she turned to an alien device to extend her life. This device: a nanobot injector. 

_[The camera briefly pans down to show a hand-held device resembling a hypospray, then returns to Dr Heriot's face.]_

The problem is it doesn't just affect your body. It also alters the way you think. Intelligence is boosted, restraints are removed. It creates genius-level intellects with no compunction about using the rest of humanity as they see fit. I know what people say about the Elite Programme, but it's nothing compared to the mentality the injector produces. 

I haven't found a way to destroy it. Brute force is out of the question — that might just release the nanobots and let them spread. The control circuits are some kind of living technology that can regenerate from any damage I throw at them, up to a full EM burst. I'd like to drop it into the Sun, but Neptune will have to do. Time's running out. There's been a ship following us, twenty hours behind us all the way from Luna. According to the flight plans it's a freighter like the _Butterfly_. But two freighters coming all the way out to Neptune on the same day? That's not a coincidence. They're after the injector, and I can't risk it falling into their hands. 

And I can't risk them getting their hands on me, either. I've studied the device for long enough that I can draw bits of it from memory. If I can, so can anyone else. I've seen my future self locked up and tortured for what's in her head. Well, at least she'll be spared that now. I won't _have_ a future self. 

There's one thing I didn't have time to sort out before I left. Tell UNISYC to go to the habidome where we took the Gundan to bits. Go into the back garden. They'll find the two missing robots there under a big tree, and the telepresence gear to control them. They need to take them to the coma ward where Rafael Chang's being looked after, and reverse their most recent upload. 

I'm sorry I've got to do this. Goodbye, Alison. 

_[Message ends.]_


	18. Restoration

> _To unmask falsehood, and bring truth to light_  
>    — William Shakespeare, _The Rape of Lucrece_

_The abandoned road by the burned-out habidome was no more welcoming than when Alison had been there before. Although she was wearing warm, dry fatigues and an army greatcoat, the gloomy chill of the place still seemed to be sinking into her bones._

_"This is the place?" Colonel Stanley asked her._

_Alison nodded. "The rest of the Gundan should be in the ditch. About there."_

_"We'll deal with that in due course." The Colonel broke off as two soldiers approached round the outer curve of the dome. "Anything to report?"_

_"Two spoonheads, sir, under a large tree as stated. No sign of any boobytraps."_

_The Colonel gestured in the direction they had come from. "Ms Swift?"_

_Alison followed him around the blackened shell of the dome, through a narrow gap between bushes, and into an area of tangled vegetation that might once have been a garden. A patch of ground had been roughly cleared, and a rectangle of vegetation was flattened and bleached. Nearby was a rough circle of blackened stones containing a few charred sticks, and a neat stack of empty tins, boxes, bottles and other packages._

_Alison gave these items only the briefest of glances as the soldier led her on, under the dome formed by the branches of a weeping willow. Two robots were carefully laid out on the ground. Shorn of their disguises, they were simple, lightweight metal figures, with spindly arms and legs, boxlike bodies, and concave dishes in lieu of heads. Beside them, carefully wrapped in clear plastic, were two telepresence sets._

_"Get those out to the transporter and load them up," the Colonel ordered his men._

_Alison, feeling miserable and insignificant, backed away as the soldiers set about retrieving their property. A few short weeks ago, seeing something like this would have been the Holy Grail for her: a secret military force, suppressing evidence of alien technology. Now, none of it seemed to matter._

_Lost in thought, she jumped at the Colonel's touch on her arm._

_"You say you hid the remains of the Gundan robot in the ditch?" he said._

_Alison mutely nodded._

_"Can you show us where?"_

_Alison led him back round the dome to the ditch. "We couldn't drag it very far," she said. "It must have been about there."_

_"Halonen." The Colonel gestured to one of his sergeants. "Have the men scan that ditch for ten metres in each direction. Metal detectors."_

_Still feeling dull and disengaged, Alison watched the men perform the scan: with metal detectors, with radar, with other devices she couldn't place, and finally by poking sticks into the opaque black ooze._

_"Nothing there, sir," the sergeant eventually said._

_The Colonel turned to Alison. "Ms Swift?"_

_"It was there!" Alison said. "I told you, we pushed it in and it sank."_

_"And you were being questioned under a Level Two mind scan at the time. You certainly believed your account to be the truth. It would seem that whatever you hid here, somebody else found it first." The Colonel turned, and headed for the transporter by which they'd arrived. "No point in spending any more time here, then. Let's get back to HQ and get those robots analysed."_

_"Will you do what Zoë said?" Alison asked. "The reverse download thing?"_

_"Unless we find a good reason not to. After all, whatever it might do to Mr Chang, it's not as if it could make things much worse for him."_

_"Can I ask a question?" Alison said, as the Colonel helped her into the passenger compartment of the transporter. "What's going to happen to me once you've finished your investigation? You're not just going to let me walk away. I must know far too much by now."_

_The Colonel strapped her into her seat. "If you're willing, we'll instil a compulsion in your mind. You'll remember everything that's happened, but you won't be able to discuss it except with myself and other UNISYC staff."_

_Alison swallowed. "And if I'm not willing?"_

_"Then you'll wake up with no memory of the last few days, and a convincing cover story about being involved in an accident. Your choice, Ms Swift."_

⁂

_They hadn't let Alison into Mr Chang's hospital room. She'd sat outside, wondering if the cold, hopeless feeling in her chest would ever go away, while the two robots had been wheeled past her. She'd overheard the muttered sounds of doctors' and technicians' voices, but had only been able to pick out the occasional random phrase._

_After what seemed like several hours, the Colonel had emerged. Alison had jumped to her feet as soon as she saw him._

_"Is he...?" she began._

_"Mr Chang has recovered consciousness," the Colonel said. "You'll be able to talk to him for a few minutes, if you want to."_

_"So those spoonheads_ are _the ones that Zoë and Lily saw in Lower Gooch Street?"_

_"It would seem that they are. Their serial numbers also correspond with the two that were stolen on the same day that Dr Heriot and Ms Carson left Earth. They will, of course, undergo a full forensic examination."_

_"But you said they couldn't have been in Lower Gooch Street — that you knew where they were at the time."_

_"We do. Further, you may recall that Dr Heriot examined them under our supervision. At that time they certainly did not contain Mr Chang's uploaded consciousness, for want of a better term. It would seem that after they were stolen, the upload was transferred into them from the actual robots used."_

_"But who stole them? Who did all that? And why would they want to?"_

_"It's far too early to go into questions of that kind. Would you like to see Mr Chang?"_

_"Have you told him about... about Zoë?"_

_The Colonel nodded. "You don't have to break the news to him."_

_"I think I'd better see him," Alison said._

_Mr Chang was still in bed and attached to a saline drip, but he was clearly conscious._

_"Hello," Alison said, in a small voice._

_He looked puzzled. "Hello. You don't look like a nurse."_

_Alison shook her head. "I'm... I was one of Zoë's friends."_

_"Zoë? Of course, that was Kate's real name, wasn't it?" He sat up slightly. "What a thing to wake up to. I thought I was getting to know her, and it was all just an act. And then to die in a spaceship crash... what happened?"_

_"She sent me a note," Alison said._

_Rafael Chang's expression of shock deepened. "You mean she did it_ on purpose? _I wouldn't have thought it of her."_

_"She used to talk to Lily and me about... what was her name? Danielle Osato. Wondering whether she could do the same. Sacrifice her life, and others, for the greater good. She said it was necessary to destroy... something she couldn't get rid of any other way."_

_"Maybe I haven't got the full picture. But I can't see Kate — Zoë — doing something like that." He closed his eyes. "When I began to suspect there was something wrong with the directors, I talked it over with her. She said 'You've got to find the truth. Don't leave any stone unturned.'"_

_"That's what I've been trying to do. The truth isn't always what we want it to be."_

_"But you'll keep looking for it, won't you?"_

_Alison nodded. "Always."_

_As she left the hospital room, she found the Colonel waiting for her._

_"We don't need any further evidence from you, Ms Swift," he said. "Once the necessary adjustments have been made to your mind, you're free to leave. Which would you prefer: the compulsion to remain silent on all these matters, or to forget these last few days altogether?"_

_"I'll take the compulsion," Alison said._

_He held out his hand. "Then come with me."_


	19. Second Time Around

> _A wrong sum can be put right: but only by going back till you find the error and working it afresh from that point_  
>    — C. S. Lewis, _The Great Divorce_

_Following the inculcation of the necessary compulsion, Alison had woken to find herself in a hospital bed with her distraught parents at her side. As far as they, and the rest of the world, were concerned, Alison had been the victim of a freak electrical accident. Her parents, and the various medical staff, were confident that she would make a full recovery._

_It was some days after her return home before Alison had begun taking walks again, and several more before she could bring herself to revisit the area of the abandoned motorway. In the end, curiosity won out over fear of what she might find there, and within half an hour she was standing once more in the wilderness behind the ruined habidome. It occurred to her how secret this place was; someone walking past the front of the dome wouldn't have a clue about its existence, from any other direction it would appear to be an impenetrable clump of trees, and the vegetation hid it from anything in the air that wasn't doing a full lidar scan._

_The place was unchanged from when she'd last stood there: the same patch of flattened vegetation, the same circle of charred stones, the same stack of litter. It seemed that nobody had been back to light another fire or throw away more picnic supplies._

_"Don't leave any stone unturned," Alison repeated to herself. One by one, she lifted each stone of the improvised fireplace. Then, that not having produced any meaningful result, she poked around in the stack of discarded food packages, with a similar lack of success. Of course, maybe there wasn't anything to find, or UNISYC had made their own search and found it. But Alison resolved that if there was still any trace left here of whoever had operated the spoonhead robots, she should find it._

_Over an hour later, scratched and bedraggled, she crawled out of the last clump of bushes. She'd explored the garden area as far as she could, searched every last hiding place, and come up with nothing. Reluctantly, she resigned herself to the fact that there was nothing to find._

_She returned to the road, and was about fifty metres away from the habidome when a thought struck her. She wavered, then turned back, and presently stepped across the threshold into the shell of the dome itself. This, too, looked unchanged from when she had last been there. Still, if she'd searched the garden, she'd better search the dome too._

_The dome itself was empty, nothing but a bare shell, so Alison concentrated on the walls, running her fingers over the charred surface. Presently, there was a slight movement under her fingers. She crouched down, wiped off some of the soot, and found she was looking at an access panel for networking equipment. It felt loose to the touch, as if the screws holding it on were no more than finger-tight. And now she looked more closely, weren't there bright scratches on the screw heads, as if they had been recently undone?_

_Sure enough, the screws unfastened easily, and the faceplate fell away. In the space behind it, apart from the rusting remains of an obsolete data interconnection, was an exercise book, damp and fragile, though the handwriting on the pages remained legible enough._

**Narrative of Lily Carson**

Sunday 6th June. At least, that's what it was when I got up.

Zoë called me early in the morning and said she was teleporting over at once. When she turned up, she was wearing her trenchcoat again, this time over hiking gear, and carrying a huge rucksack. I'd been planning to go out for the day, but that didn't cut any ice with her. She flat-out ordered me to put on my hiking clothes, pack another rucksack and come with her — and she wasn't going to take 'no' for an answer.

We took the T-Mat to a sleazy-looking shopping arcade, and at Zoë's insistence transferred as much money as we could from our bank accounts to anonymous cryptopens. Then we teleported again, this time to a monorail station somewhere in the North African Zone, and set out walking along a dusty road into the desert. 

"What are you doing?" I asked, as we left the station and started out. It was the first time I'd to say more than two or three words to her.

"I'm testing a private theory," Zoë said. "But it needs two of us." 

"What sort of theory?" 

"OK. You know Alison thinks the breakin at the Ingomar Tower was orchestrated by the Ragged Man?" 

I nodded. 

"Well, I don't agree with her. But no-one's come up with any other plausible explanations, except possibly my theory. Either way, the only way we'll get proof is by finding out who bought the access token. That's what I intend to do." 

"But whoever bought the access token was in Brasilia, not in the middle of a desert in NorAf Zone!" 

"I know what I'm doing." 

"I don't." 

"It's safer that way," Zoë said, and wouldn't talk any more about it. 

After we'd walked for what felt like hours, we arrived at a low-rise building. It was made of concrete and looked built for defence, though whether that was against military action or just time, I wasn't sure. It had a massively overengineered look that made me think it was designed to last for centuries or millennia. 

The road ran up to a huge gateway, with more human-sized doorways on either side of it. All the openings were uncompromisingly blocked with heavy-looking metal doors, dull but not rusted. There were a few brief, plain notices saying who to call in an emergency, but nothing to say who the place belonged to. 

Zoë walked up to one of the smaller doors, produced a gymnasium loyalty token from her pocket, and held it up in front of her. The doors, which must have been easily ten centimetres thick, slid open, and we darted in. Inside was a lift, which descended into the bowels of the earth before opening to reveal a world of bare concrete corridors, stainless steel fittings and functional lighting. It reminded me of an old-style nuclear bunker. 

I didn't dare speak in case I set off countless alarms, so I couldn't ask Zoë what she'd done to the token. Most likely she'd forged the right credentials using the probability vector navigator. I wondered what would happen if we met anyone else, and they started asking awkward questions. Zoë's reprogrammed token might fool a door lock, but almost certainly not the sort of guards you'd expect to be on patrol in a secure storage facility. The trouble was, Zoë looked determined enough that I was afraid if anyone tried to stop her she might just pull a gun and shoot them. 

She must have memorised the guards' patrol patterns, because we took a strange zigzagging route through the corridors, diverting now and again through large caverns stacked with sealed, neatly indexed boxes or racks of data crystals. We didn't get noticed, though once we had to dive behind a forklift while someone walked unhurriedly past the other side of it. I was quite out of breath by the time Zoë stopped in front of another steel door, halfway down a corridor lined with similar doorways. She touched her loyalty token to the door, and it slid open with a soft hiss of air. Beyond it was a reasonably small room, its concrete walls lined with racks of strongboxes. 

"Hold onto this," Zoë said, and pulled the grey cylinder from her pocket. 

Brilliant light blazed around us, and once more we were in the white void. 

"I thought you said that was broken," I said. 

"I also said it would take me a few days to fix it," Zoë said. "Well, I fixed it. Please don't ask me a lot of questions, Lily, however pertinent. This next bit is time critical. You've got to trust me and do exactly what I say. Or else I don't know what the consequences will be. OK?" 

"OK." 

"Right. We need to walk forward four paces." 

Still holding onto the cylinder with one hand each, we stepped forward, Zoë solemnly counting each pace. Then, still holding onto the cylinder with one hand, she reached into her pocket with the other, pulled out a head torch, pushed it onto her own head, and switched it on. 

"This next bit's going to be tricky," she said. "If I've got this right, we'll arrive in a room containing two robots and two sets of telepresence equipment. The moment we get there we each pick up one telepresence set, hang them over our arms, then take hold of one robot each. Then we grab onto the gadget with our free hands, and use it to get out of there again. Got that?" 

"One telepresence set. One robot. Hold the gadget in our free hands." 

"Right. Oh, and we need to take a deep breath and hold it. The room is filled with a pure nitrogen atmosphere: breathe it and you'll suffocate. Ready?" 

I breathed in deeply, and nodded. 

Zoë did something with her hand, and the white light faded. We were in darkness, illuminated only by the beam of Zoë's head torch. Even as she swung the beam around, alarms began to sound. It was a dead room; there was no door or window, only an inactive T-Mat. 

The beam of the torch fell on the telepresence sets, hanging on the wall. We each snatched up a set, then looked around until we saw the robots, side by side. They were lightweight, boxy devices, with the same silver dishes for heads that I'd seen on the Amelia and Rory robots. 

As Zoë caught hold of one robot, and I took the other by the hand, the T-Mat lit up. Zoë held out the cylinder; I caught hold of it. A soldier, wearing a breathing mask and with her weapon at the ready, materialised inside the T-Mat. At the same moment, the cylinder flared into life again. 

This time we didn't end up in the white void. It felt as if we were being dragged downwards, or spun around in a roaring whirlpool. Some force was trying to pull Zoë and me apart from each other; I gritted my teeth and hung on with all my strength. 

The sensations broke off abruptly, leaving me feeling as if I'd just run into a wall. There was something cold, hard and damp pressing against my face, and I gradually realised it was the ground. I felt as if I'd just gone over a waterfall in a barrel. 

As the dizziness cleared, I was able to look around and realised where we were. We were lying on the trackway outside the ruined habidome, almost exactly where we'd disabled the Gundan before. Zoë was lying beside me, not injured as far as I could see, but with a stunned expression. The two robots were on either side of us. 

"What..." I looked around. "What happened? How did we get here?" 

"This is where we dumped the rest of the Gundan," Zoë said. "I suppose that must have drawn us here." She managed to roll over into a sitting position, dug in her coat pocket and pulled out a smouldering circuit board. "I hope it's brought us to the right time, because it doesn't look like we're getting another try." 

I tried to follow suit, and ended up on my back looking up at her. " _Now_ are you please going to tell me what's going on?" 

"OK." Zoë took a deep breath. "If the device worked as it should have, we've travelled in time. I'm not sure how far — give me a moment and I'll see if I can pick up a satellite clock signal." She set her rucksack down and dug out one of her handwired circuits. "Here we are. The fifth of May." A relieved smile appeared on her face, and rapidly became a grin. "It worked!" 

"You mean we've actually travelled in time?" 

"By thirty-two days," Zoë said. "We've only checked out. It's not as if we can leave."


	20. A Point of Principle

> _You can never plan the future by the past._  
>    — Edmund Burke 

**Narrative of Lily Carson**

Thursday 6th May, if I believe Zoë. I'm starting to. 

Didn't have time to write any more yesterday. We were too busy finding somewhere to set up a tent and hide the spoon-headed robots. Zoë managed to get the telepresence gear working, so we could control the robots and make them walk around under their own power. I don't think we could have done it if we'd had to drag them by hand. 

The tent's in what I suppose was once the back garden of the habidome. It's now just a dense thicket with lots of trees and undergrowth — you have to crawl between two bushes to get in there. It's certainly not likely that a passer-by would spot where we are. The robots are tucked away under one of the biggest trees, one where the branches hang down almost to the ground. Hopefully that'll keep the rain off them and stop anyone noticing them. 

After we'd dealt with all that, we crawled into the tent and got into our sleeping bags. I wrote up yesterday's entry — Zoë had told me not to bring any sort of electronic device except the cryptopens, so I'd stuck a notebook and pen in my rucksack. I fell asleep pretty much halfway through writing it. 

Of course, Zoë woke me up in the middle of the night with one of her nightmares. It must have been a bad one, by the way she was screaming. She couldn't remember what the dream had been, of course; she never does. 

"What's your theory?" I asked, trying to distract her. 

Zoë still sounded shaky. "What theory?" 

"You said you had a private theory about who was behind the Ingomar Tower business." 

"Who _is_ behind it. It hasn't happened yet, remember." 

"All right, who _is_ behind it, then." 

"I'll tell you tomorrow," Zoë said. "Once we've been to Brasilia." 

"Why are we..." Even half-asleep, I managed to figure out what she was driving at. "The access token?" 

"Correct. It gets bought tomorrow at 15:42 local time. We position ourselves where we can see the booth where it was issued, and keep an eye on everyone who goes into it." 

It sounds easy. I'm not sure it is. 

⁂

**Later:** Actually, it was pretty easy. At least in terms of what we had to do. 

We walked into Castlethorpe, on the same route we'd taken before, tidied ourselves up (as much as we could) in a public convenience, and then took the T-Mat to Brasilia. Zoë had memorised the location of the booth where the token was sold, so we just walked along between quaint, old-fashioned tower blocks and precisely-spaced public gardens, until we came to the right place. We took up our positions, one on each side of the road, trying to conceal ourselves as best we could behind a symmetrical pair of ornamental palm trees. 

I'd bought a souvenir wristwatch from a shop near the T-Mat. Despite trying to keep my eyes on the booth, I couldn't help glancing down at the watch. Every time I did, time seemed to be passing more and more slowly. It was a hot, sunny afternoon, and there were very few people about; each time I heard someone's footsteps, I wondered if this might be the mastermind behind the raid on FaloCorp. Maybe the Ragged Man himself, if Alison's guess was right. 

When I saw the time on the watch was 15:41, I forced myself to stare at the booth and count slowly to a hundred and twenty. The road seemed almost unnaturally quiet, with not so much as a footstep approaching, or a breeze to shake the leaves of the trees. Thirty. He ought to be in earshot by now. Unless he had some kind of personal teleporter, like the time machine Zoë had made from bits of Gundan. Maybe he'd just appear out of nowhere, or pop out of a trapdoor in the pavement. 

I kept counting, my eyes fixed on the booth. A hundred and eighteen. A hundred and nineteen. A hundred and twenty. And in all that time, no-one had gone into the booth, or even near it. I kept counting, not sure what else to do. A hundred and fifty... A hundred and seventy... 

It looked as if the tension of the situation had got to Zoë. With an impatient expression, she walked briskly out from behind her palm tree and made straight for the booth. I could see her poking around in there, then she came out and crossed over to me. 

"It looks as if my theory's true," she said, sounding as if she was confronting an unwelcome truth. 

"So are you going to tell me what it is now?" I asked. 

"I suppose I'd better." Zoë nodded at a nearby public garden, not much more than a square of grass with a stone bench shaded by a couple of trees. "Let's sit down and I'll talk you through it." 

We sat down. 

"Even if the Ragged Man exists, he didn't buy that token," Zoë said. "One of us would have seen him." 

"Could he have rigged some sort of remote control? So he'd actually be somewhere else, but it would seem he was in the booth?" 

"He could have, but I checked the booth and there isn't any remote control device in there." 

"What if he can make himself invisible?" 

"That's impossible... well, I used to think time travel was impossible. But no-one, visible or invisible, bought anything in that booth. It was in power-saving mode and that means it hadn't been used for the past five minutes." 

"Then how did he..." 

Zoë held up a hand. "Lily, I know he didn't buy the token and send it to you. I did it." 

I didn't answer, just stared at her. 

"I had to," Zoë went on. "According to the Novikov self-consistency principle, a time traveller's actions are constrained. They have to act in such a way that paradox is avoided. Someone bought that token, and I was the only person there, so I had to do it. Three minutes later than I should have done, but hopefully that's close enough to keep history on track." She forced a smile. "I wonder if I'd have done the same if I'd never heard of Novikov and his principle?" 

"But if you bought the token..." 

Zoë nodded. "Then in all probability I will be the one controlling the robots during the raid on FaloCorp — and the events in Lower Gooch Street. Or rather, _we_ will: two robots need two telepresence sets, and that means two operators." 

"You mean, we've got to go through the next month making sure that everything happens the way we remember it happening?" 

"That's right." 

I gave her a long look. "This is your private theory, isn't it? You suspected this was what would happen." 

"It was always a possibility. Ever since you said the robots picked you out. That suggested the robots were being controlled by someone who knew you. And with the bits of the Gundan, I thought it might be possible for me to make the time jump. But it was only a vague possibility until I went through the security footage from the carnival." 

Despite the balmy day and the warm stone of the bench, I felt cold. "What did you see?" 

Zoë produced an envelope from her pocket. "This." 

I opened the envelope. Inside was a printout of a single frame of security footage: three of the clowns, outflanking Ms Thring's guards so that we could make our escape. Two of them carried large, brightly-coloured clubs; the third, a smaller and slimmer figure, had a custard pie in each hand. 

I looked from the pictured clown, to Zoë as she sat beside me, and back. The red nose, facepaint and frizzy ginger wig meant it took me a few goes to see the likeness, but I got there in the end. 

"That's you?" I asked. 

Zoë nodded again. "That's me. Or rather, it will be me, in twenty days' time. You remember you said I shouted at you to run, but I was positive I hadn't? Well, if I go there again I can make sure to shout at you this time round." 

"But we can't arrange the breakin at FaloCorp just like that! We don't know how it was done." 

"We've got six days to work that out." Zoë stood up. "So we'd better start thinking about it on the way back to the T-Mat." 

"Just the two of us, with the clothes we're standing up in and a couple of robots, and we're going to burgle FaloCorp?" 

"Just the two of us." Zoë stuck a hand in her coat pocket, and looked puzzled. "Hang on. What's this?" 

"What's what?" 

"There's something in my pocket and I'm sure I didn't put it there." 

I couldn't resist doing an imitation of her. "Logically, therefore, someone else did." 

Zoë looked around the near-deserted street. "But it can't have been this afternoon. No-one's got close enough. And the same applies to yesterday." 

"When was the last time you wore that coat before yesterday?" 

"At the Shadow Market." Zoë nodded. "Yes, it could have been someone there. We know they planted one tracking device on me. Maybe this is another." 

She cut short her speculation and brought her hand out of her pocket, along with what she'd found: an old-fashioned plastic card. One side showed a hologram of a butterfly; on the other, a few simple lines of text floated above the plastic surface. 

EM FERGUS  
GENERAL TRANSPORT  
Shortcode: 641224 — any time.


	21. Honour Among Thieves

> _The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth is my long suit here, I fancy_  
>    — Dorothy L. Sayers, _Whose Body?_

**Narrative of Lily Carson**

Monday 10th May. 

We met up with Em Fergus today. We'd got a message telling us to go to the Ratchett Museum in seadome Dogger-4, and wait for her at the exhibition of neo-Elizabethan self-assembly furniture. It wasn't the sort of exhibition that was drawing crowds; there were one or two earnest students, and a tall man in a long coat who left soon after we got there. We nervously hung about, trying to look as if we were taking an interest in the exhibits. 

"That panel's been put in upside-down," Zoë said, pointing at a bookcase. "Look, the grain goes the right way on all the other panels, but on this one it goes the other way." 

I took a closer look, and realised she was right. It was the sort of thing I'd never have noticed by myself — but once I had noticed it, I couldn't stop seeing it. 

"How come you notice things like that?" I asked. 

Zoë shrugged. "I suppose it's just how my mind works. I try to come up with a model, for want of a better word, of how something should work. And then bits that don't fit into the model jump out at me." 

"I wouldn't have noticed it at all," I said. 

"Seems there's a lot you don't notice," a voice said behind me. 

We jumped, and spun round. There was a woman there: tall, middle-aged, dressed in a plum-coloured jacket and trousers. 

"Captain Em Fergus," she said. "And you're Kate Compline and Enja Adebayo. Which aren't your real names, of course, but they'll do for now." 

I was too busy trying to fit new pieces into my own mental model. I'd recognised her at once; the last time I'd seen her, she'd been on stage in a top hat and tails, playing conjuring tricks, and calling herself Tish Lamont. Except that hasn't happened yet. 

"I expect your name isn't Em Fergus either," Zoë said. 

Captain Fergus laughed. "Of course not. In my line of business real names are a liability." She looked around, to see if anyone was paying us the slightest attention, but by now the gallery was empty. "What's your business with me, then?" 

"How do we know we can trust you?" I asked. 

She shrugged. "You don't. But you wanted to talk to me, didn't you? Or you wouldn't be here." 

"We need to recover... an item from the Ingomar Tower," Zoë said. "Using remotely-controlled robots. Now, we've got a rough plan, but it requires a base of operations somewhere near the Tower — which is in the middle of the sea." 

"Meaning you need a ship or dirigible," Captain Fergus said. 

"Can you do it?" 

"Don't see why not. But why should I?" 

Zoë and I exchanged glances. 

"I don't know," I said. "Is there some way we could pay you...?" 

She waved a hand dismissively. "You couldn't afford me. Money's boring, anyway. I think there are much more interesting ways you could be useful." 

"So you'll help us?" 

"On conditions." She walked slowly around us. "One, I want to know everything about this plan of yours. You've not got a lot of experience in crime, have you?" 

Zoë shook her head mutely. 

"Right. So it pays to have an expert look it over and spot if you've missed anything. Two, I want all the sordid details on this 'item' you're trying to 'recover.'" She put an arm round each of our shoulders. "And three, I want to know where you got my contact details." 

Between us, I think we managed to satisfy her on the first two points. But the third one was obviously a bit trickier. 

"Someone stuck my card in your pocket at the Shadow Market?" she said, raising an eyebrow. "Where was this? And when?" 

"It's a bit complicated," I mumbled. 

"I like complicated. And don't worry if it's a long story: time isn't a problem." She smiled, but there was a touch of steel in it. "If thieves can't be honest with each other what's the world coming to?" 

"Well." Zoë took a deep breath. "It was on the twenty-sixth of this month, on the roof park of Carnaby-A2 block in London." She looked at Captain Fergus, whose expression was giving nothing away. "We've travelled back in time, you see." 

"And I'm expected to believe that?" 

"It's the only explanation I can give you," Zoë said. 

"And where did you get a time machine?" 

The only way we could answer this was by telling the whole story of how we'd found the Gundan, and how Zoë had used its parts to transport us back in time. 

"OK," Captain Fergus said, after we'd finally reached the end of our tale. "I'll take your word for it." 

"You believe us?" I asked. 

"Either you made that story up, or it's true. If it's true, what's left of that Gundan is valuable alien technology: you can use it to pay me for my help. If you made the whole thing up, you're two of the best liars I've met. And I'm keeping my eye on you until I know which you are." She fell silent for a while, pacing round the exhibition without seeming to see it. "Call me on Wednesday at fourteen, and I'll let you know what I've arranged." 

"We told her an awful lot," I said, after Captain Fergus had gone and we were on our own. "Are you sure that was a good idea?" 

"It's a risk, certainly," Zoë said. "But I don't think we can pull off the operation without her. And we know the operation succeeds, because we've lived through it already." 

"But it might be different this time. Actually, it's different already, isn't it? You bought that token three minutes later than you were supposed to." 

"If the Novikov principle's right, a minor change like that should resolve itself," Zoë said. "Each time round the loop wouldn't have to be identical, but they'll end up the same on average." 

I couldn't help asking "What if the Novikov principle isn't right?" 

"Then anything we do could cause a paradox. It might tear the entire Universe apart, or perhaps we'd collapse into a black hole." 

"Oh," I said weakly. "I'll try not to cause one, then." 

Zoë put her hands on her hips. "And that's another good reason to make sure everything goes right on Thursday." 

Tuesday 11th May. 

We spent today practising with the robots until we had a firm grasp on what they could do, and how to get them to do it. Previously, it was all we could do to get them to walk where we wanted them to. By the time we'd finished, we could control all the electronic countermeasures packed into them, and cycle through their collection of holographic disguises. The disguises don't hide the dishes on the backs of their heads, so we took a quick walk into Castlethorpe and bought them a collection of hats. Zoë was on edge all the time we were there — I think she was worried Alison might see us, and whether it would cause a time paradox if she did. 

All this excitement isn't doing her nightmares any good, either. She doesn't remember them, but I can pick up a few clues from what she says in her sleep. They all seem to be about one of the big twentieth-century wars. I know if I asked her she'd come up with a convincing explanation, but listening to her I could almost believe she was actually there in the trenches.


	22. The Quickness of the Hand

> _A clever theft was praiseworthy among the Spartans_  
>    — Herbert Spencer, _Social Statics_

Friday 14th May. 

Didn't have time last night to write up how things went, so I'm doing it this morning. Hope I haven't forgotten anything. 

We got up early, powered up the robots, and switched on their disguises. Most of them seemed to be historical costumes, but we found a couple that wouldn't stand out too much, and gave them hats to match. Then we put on the telepresence gear, and walked the robots to the Castlethorpe public T-Mat booth. Captain Fergus had given us a one-use code, so we got the robots into the booth, squeezed in with them, and entered the code. It seemed to take a bit longer than a T-Mat journey usually does, but we materialised at the other end without problems. We'd arrived on a cruise ship — not a megaliner like the _Liberty_ , but definitely something built for holidaymakers. 

Captain Fergus wasn't waiting for us, but I recognised the man who was: her assistant, the man in the Union Jack waistcoat whom Zoë had called 'John Bull'. 

"Tish said you'd be coming," he said. "Follow me and I'll get you backstage." 

We took control of the robots again, and followed him down a flight of stairs and into a cramped dressing room. 

"She's on stage now," the man said. "She said you won't be disturbed here." 

"Did she tell you why we're here?" Zoë asked. 

"All I know is you're here to assist with one of her tricks. The rest's between you and her." He tapped his nose. "I don't pry into her secrets." 

He left. 

We made ourselves as comfortable as we could. There was a small globe on the dressing table: the picklock that the robots had used to break open the storeroom. Or rather, that was what they would be doing, under our control. 

"Which robot had this?" Zoë asked, picking it up. 

I thought back. "The Amelia one." 

"Then we need to decide which robot's going to be Amelia." Zoë paused in thought. "I think it should be your robot. You said Amelia was the one who did most of the talking — you've been through this once already, so you'll know what to say." 

"It'd be so tempting to say something different," I said. 

"Please don't," Zoë said. "Paradoxes, remember." 

Once we were sure the right robot had the picklock, and each one had a bag with the proper headgear for the Amelia and Rory disguises, we put the telepresence helmets on again and walked the robots back to the ship's T-Mat. We didn't risk teleporting them straight to the Ingomar Tower — that would have been far too obvious — so we sent them by a roundabout route. 

"ECM on, level two," Zoë said, as we walked the robots out of the FaloCorp T-Mat booth. 

"ECM on, level two aye," I said, moving the correct switch. 

"I've worked out a route to get us to your creativity pod," Zoë said. "We won't change the disguises until we're almost there." 

We fell silent until our robots were a few tens of metres from the creativity pod. Then we switched the disguises, turned on the full range of electronic warfare gadgets, and advanced. Forcefields snapped across the corridors as the tower's systems detected our intrusion, but the robots' countermeasures took care of them; each forcefield winked out as we approached, and reappeared after we'd passed. 

And then we were at the door of the pod, and I was staring at myself, and thinking that the past version of me was wearing a particularly gormless expression. I pulled myself together, and tried to remember what the Amelia-robot had said to me before. I turned on the microphone. 

"She'll do," I said. 

It was a strange experience, going through events I'd already lived through. It reminded me of what I'd read about being hypnotised — it feels as if you can snap out of it any time you want, but in practice you end up doing what the hypnotist says. Maybe there is something in that idea about time travellers being forced to do what they already know they've done. 

Once we — or rather, the robots, under our direction — had gone through all the boxes and locked my past self in the cupboard, we took the robots along another corridor to a cargo grav-tube, and rode it to a loading bay. Now we were outside the scope of what I remembered, I didn't feel the same sensation of being hypnotised. Instead I just got more and more uneasy, because now I didn't know what we had to do next to keep history on track. 

"I _knew_ this was how they got it out," Zoë said. Her robot was carrying something sleek, metallic and purple, the approximate size and shape of a small blaster. "How we got it out, that is. Can you hold the drone up, please?" 

My robot had the disabled security drone, so I raised my hands to hold it out. Working slowly and clumsily through the telepresence gloves, Zoë opened an access panel on the drone, tucked the purple thing inside, and closed the panel again. The drone rose in the air, and disappeared into a ventilation duct. 

"Now we change the robots' disguises back and teleport out, don't we?" I said. 

"That was what I thought," Zoë said. "But Captain Fergus came up with a better idea. We pack the robots in a vac-crate and have them shipped out as freight." 

Climbing into a crate with another person and closing it from the inside is one of those things that's a lot easier to describe than do. Doing it with a couple of remotely-controlled robots was just as hard. It did help that the robots could fold up much more neatly than a person, so that they fitted into a space a person wouldn't. We moved the crate to where several others were ready to be shipped out; then Zoë addressed it to a cargo pickup point in Mombasa. We got the two robots squeezed into the tiny space, pulled the lid down on top of them, and powered them down. 

"Nicely done," Captain Fergus's voice said behind us, as we wearily pulled our telepresence helmets off. I looked round, to see her in her magician costume. 

"You've been watching?" Zoë asked. 

"For quite a while. I'm as curious as the next woman, if not more. And it's very useful to know what FaloCorp have got that they shouldn't." She looked at us. "You'd better get something to eat. I'm doing another performance at three, so everyone'll be watching me when the drone arrives." 

"You mean you're distracting everyone from what we're doing with conjuring tricks?" I said. 

"Misdirection." With a flourish, she removed her top hat and produced a moth-eaten glove puppet of a rabbit. "Half my tricks rely on it." She turned the puppet inside-out, and tossed it to the floor; it sat up, looked around, then lolloped into the corner of the room. "As for the other half... now, that's magic."


	23. Closing the Circle

> _There is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother._  
>    — Proverbs 18:24 

**Narrative of Lily Carson**

Thursday 26th May. 

It's a couple of hours since Zoë got back from being a clown at the Shadow Market. I think the trip's done her good — if there hadn't been something to take her mind off the medical device we took from FaloCorp, I think she might have made one of her 'suboptimal decisions' by now. 

Ever since we got hold of the device — we've decided to call it a nanobot injector — she's spent nearly all her time trying to find a way to destroy it safely. It would be easy enough to bash it with a lump of rock or something, but she's worried that might spread its nanobots all over the area and infect hundreds of people. What she'd like to do is dismantle it carefully, but after nearly a fortnight she can't even open it up. It seems to be completely sealed. 

Captain Fergus showed up in the afternoon with a cargo skimmer, to pick up the remains of the Gundan. We helped her haul the dismembered bits out of the ditch and load it into the skimmer. 

"I don't think it'll be much good," I said. "Not after all the time it's been in there." 

"Better safe than sorry," Captain Fergus said. "Even if I can't get anything useful out of it, at least I know it's not in the wrong hands." 

"Who would you consider the wrong hands?" Zoë asked. 

"FaloCorp, for starters. And they're not the only ones. Some people will do anything for alien artefacts, whatever state they're in. Talking of which, how are you getting on with the one we went to all the trouble of stealing?" 

"It's a work in progress," Zoë said. 

"You're sure you don't want to sell it at the Shadow Market? There's one tonight. If your time travel story's right that's where I meet you for the first time and give you my card." 

"Yes. I wanted to talk about that. You see, I think I need to go there with you and go through it again." She explained about seeing herself on the security footage, disguised as a clown. 

"Both of you?" Captain Fergus asked. 

Zoë shook her head. "Just me. If you don't mind, Lily, I think it would be safer if you stayed here and kept an eye on things. We know there are FaloCorp agents at the Shadow Market, and I don't want to risk them getting their hands on the device." 

"OK," I said. 

She got in the skimmer with Captain Fergus. They took off, leaving me all alone. There wasn't a lot to do, after I'd picked up some wood for the fire and topped up the water purifier, and I ended up fidgeting nervously. I knew it was safest if I stayed out of sight, but not being able to see the path began to worry me. Then I started to get ideas about the woods: that there were people creeping through the undergrowth, who'd jump on me and drag me away the moment my back was turned. 

Then I did hear something that wasn't in my imagination. There were footsteps coming up the abandoned road; it sounded as if there might be two or three people. I dived under the big tree and threw myself flat between the robots, hoping they didn't have infrared or anything sophisticated. 

"Anything now, Bill?" a man's voice asked. 

There was a crackle and a beep. "Only background," another voice replied. 

"Another false positive, then. Back to the T-Mat." 

The footsteps died away. I stayed put for another twenty minutes before I dared to move. I tiptoed round the side of the dome to make sure the abandoned road was empty, which it was. And I stayed on tenterhooks all evening until Zoë came back. Everything at the Shadow Market seemed to have gone smoothly enough, just as we remembered it from the first time round. 

I told her what had happened to me, too, and we decided to stagger our sleep patterns so there's always someone on watch. I took the early watch, which is why I'm writing this while she tries to get some sleep. I don't know if I'll get much sleep when it's my turn. I'm sure there are people looking for the device. Or maybe for Zoë, and that's why they didn't detect anything this afternoon. Either way, they're getting far too close. 

⁂

Saturday 29 May. 

After a couple of nights keeping watch in turns, I felt pretty much like the walking dead this morning. And Zoë didn't look much better, when she dragged herself out of the tent. 

"Anything happen in the night?" she asked. 

I shook my head. "Not a thing. Maybe whoever it is wasn't looking for us, after all." 

"That would be nice." Zoë yawned. "It'd be a nuisance if it turned out the Ragged Man really was looking for us, after all the trouble we've gone to to prove he wasn't involved with any of this." 

"You're sure?" 

"He wasn't in Brasilia and he wasn't at the Ingomar Tower and he wasn't at Soho. Unless he shows up today at Lower Gooch Street, I don't see where he can fit into this." 

"We're going to Lower Gooch Street, then?" 

Zoë was trying to comb her tangled hair. "I think we've got to. We saw the robots there: no-one's stolen them, so we've got to bring them." 

"Is Captain Fergus going to pick us up again?" 

"I don't think there's any need to involve her. There's a pod-hotel a few streets away from Lower Gooch Street where you can book rooms by the hour. We can use that as our base of operations. We'd better get moving." She rubbed her face. "If we get to the hotel early I'm going to have a long hot shower. I really need one." 

"What if whoever's looking for us finds us on the way there?" 

Zoë shrugged. "Then there's a time paradox. We'll have to trust to Novikov." 

We set out not long afterwards, trying to let as few people as possible see us. We must have been a pretty strange sight: two hikers in bulky helmets and gloves, accompanied by a pair of orange-jacketed workmen wearing hard hats. As usual, we T-Matted by an indirect route, but we still got to the hotel in good time. I wondered what on Earth the receptionist made of us, but he was obviously far too well trained to react. 

Once Zoë had had her promised shower, we went through the same routine as before, putting on our telepresence gear and sending the robots out under remote control. We took them into a quiet side street where there was an access hatch to the sewers, and sent them down the ladder. Even through the telepresence set, which doesn't do smells, it wasn't a sight for anyone with a weak stomach. 

"We head along here for about— about—" Zoë began, and fell silent. 

"Are you OK?" I asked her. I would have squeezed her hand, but all our hands were fully occupied controlling the robots. 

"Touch of déjà-vu again. I keep thinking I've been here before." 

"What, in this sewer? Ewwww." 

"I share your opinion of it, Lily. And if I ever had been in a sewer before, I'd hardly forget it." 

"Unless it's something to do with your memory block." 

"What memory block?" Zoë began. Then, as if I'd triggered some sort of reset mechanism, she skipped back to the previous topic of conversation. "We head along here for about four hundred metres. Then we come to another Personal Access Chamber and climb the ladder. We'll switch disguises then." 

"OK," I said, though I was getting more worried about her mental state than about the task ahead of us. 

We reached the ladder without difficulty. Getting the robots, now in their Amelia and Rory forms, up it was a harder job, but we got there in the end. As the robots climbed out onto the street, I could see our past selves in conversation with Mr Chang, and the sniper fire smashing into the force field. 

"Of course!" Zoë said. 

"Of course what?" 

"That's why Rafael's got to be put in a coma. As long as he's alive, FaloCorp will go all out to kill him. But they'll stop shooting if they see him fall. And after that he'll be in hospital under guard: that should keep him safe until FaloCorp get shut down in a few days' time." 

"But he..." 

"Don't argue, Lily! I need you to concentrate on what you're doing. I'll provide covering fire: you centre the crosshair on Rafael and click 'Upload.'" 

I did as I was told. Mr Chang stiffened and froze in position; so did our earlier selves. I felt trapped, too: as if history had a tight hold of me and was forcing my actions. As the robot's head swung round to focus its dish on Mr Chang, there was nothing I could do except watch. For a few endless seconds, a progress bar was superimposed on my view of what the robot could see. As the bar slid smoothly up to a hundred percent, Mr Chang buckled and collapsed. 

We made our escape while the going was good. Rather than bring the robots to the hotel room, we met them outside and teleported away. 

And now we're back at our campsite and we'll go back to taking turns to keep guard against someone we're not even sure is looking for us. 

"We'll have to stay here for at least another week," Zoë said. She was already talking with a fraction of her full attention, running some sort of electronic probe over the nanobot injector. "After that, we'll have caught up with ourselves and we can pick where we left off." 

"Unless someone finds us before then, of course," I said. 

"Yes." Zoë put the probe down and looked across at me. "We've now accounted for all the events our earlier selves experienced. That means, if anything happens to us, the Novikov principle won't save us." 

"You mean someone could kidnap us without causing a time paradox?" 

"Exactly." 

"Something to look forward to, then," I said. "I'll take the first watch." 

I suppose the only bright side about this is that when she gets her usual war nightmares she won't wake me up, because I'll already be awake. 

Tuesday 1st June. 

Six more days till we come out of the time loop and get on with our lives. At least, that's how we planned it out, three or four weeks ago, when we arrived here. I can go back to my house, wait for our earlier selves to leave, and then go in, change into some clean clothes, and slip back into my life as if nothing had happened. 

I don't think it's that simple any more. At least not for Zoë. She's spending every waking moment trying to shut down that nanobot injector and getting nowhere. Last night she lost her temper and threw it in the fire — it seemed to burn all right, but after we raked it out of the ashes it was just as sleek and shiny and undamaged as before. 

"Suppose you can't destroy it?" I said. 

"Logically, there must be some way. Some level of force it wouldn't be able to resist." The argument sounded well-rehearsed, as if she'd been trying to convince herself for days. "The problem is finding a force that I can bring to bear on it. Blowing it up with a Z-bomb might work, but there's no way I could get my hands on one. Out here I've got hardly anything." 

"So what are you going to try?" 

"Once we're out of the time loop I'm going to give it an EM burst." 

"The same thing you used on the Gundan?" 

"That's right." 

"It didn't work on the Gundan." 

"That's a special case!" Zoë insisted. 

"And an alien nanobot injector that doesn't burn when you set it alight isn't a special case?" 

Zoë sighed. "I know. If that fails, all I can think of is trying to zap it with a blaster. It would have to be done on some moon or asteroid with no biosphere, so that the nanobots wouldn't contaminate anything if they got out." She looked down at the injector. "And there's always the temptation to use it on myself. Maybe it would enhance my brain enough that I'd be able to shut it down." 

"But you wouldn't want to shut it down then, would you?" 

"Almost certainly not, but there's that shadow of doubt. _Maybe_ I could resist the effect." 

"Don't risk it," I said. 

I don't think it would be right to leave her in this state. Wherever she goes after we come out of the time loop, I'm going to have to go with her. 

Wednesday 2nd June. 

Whoever's looking for us is getting close. Too close for comfort. There's been a skimmer flying search patterns overhead all morning, and five minutes ago we heard people in the woods. We're going to have to run for it. Zoë's taking the tent down now. We can't bring the robots: we'll have to leave them and hope they don't get found. I'm going to hide these notes in the dome. Hopefully when this is all over I can come back and write them up in my diary. 

Lily Carson.


	24. Case Closed

> _Where the SAIB has described a factor as being linked to cause and the term is unqualified, this means that the SAIB has satisfied itself that the evidence supports both the presence of the factor and its direct relevance to the causation of the accident._  
>    — Standard introductory text of SAIB reports, first used in 2062 

_"I'm grateful that you brought this to us, Ms Swift," the Colonel said, resting his fingers on the exercise book. "Even if the material could never be entered in the public record, it does fill in a few of the blanks in this incident."_

_"So you believe what Lily wrote?"_

_"The robots' internal clocks and log files agree with Ms Carson's account. Otherwise, I agree, it would be somewhat far-fetched."_

_"So what happened to them after that?"_

_"It's a given that they evaded their pursuers — if there even were any pursuers. They were both in an excitable frame of mind; they could have imagined it."_

_"Do you think they did?" Alison asked bluntly._

_He shook his head. "We know FaloCorp had hired Ms Thring to locate Dr Heriot and retrieve the nano-injector. These people might have been another string to their bow. Or there are other parties with an interest in the device. The Butler Institute, or the SCP Foundation, to name two. They could easily have picked up enough information to take an interest. Perhaps Captain Fergus gave them the tip-off — at the right price, of course."_

_"So Zoë and Lily went into hiding until they were out of the time loop," Alison said. "Then they went back to Zoë's flat and tried the EM burst."_

_"Which we may deduce was unsuccessful, since they promptly headed for Luna and joined Captain Fergus aboard the_ Butterfly _. And, no less promptly, the ship set off for Neptune."_

_"Lily's notes didn't say anything about Captain Fergus," Alison said. "I suppose that was several days before. They could have decided to call her and ask for advice again. Or see if she could stop off at an asteroid on the way."_

_"Even with current space drives, orbital mechanics would prevent that."_

_Alison wondered briefly whether to mention the ultra-secret reactionless drive that she'd recently read about. She decided against; if the government was suppressing the technology, as her sources assured her was the case, it was hardly likely that a common space freighter would be fitted with it._

_"But another ship followed them all the way to Neptune. Someone wanted that injector really badly, didn't they?" Alison found her voice shaking. "That was what made Zoë do it. She couldn't risk them getting the injector — or her."_

_"That's how we reconstruct the sequence of events."_

_"I wonder who sent the ship after them?" Alison said. "It must have been someone with a lot of money, to have it launch so quickly. And a big organisation, too. Do you know who it was?"_

_The Colonel gave her a long look. "You know that UNISYC is prepared to take any action in the defence of the Solar System, Ms Swift."_

_"So it was you?" Alison's voice filled with sudden anguish. "It's all your fault! If you hadn't been chasing Zoë she wouldn't have killed—"_

_"— Herself, and Lily Carson, and Emerald Fergus also known as Patricia Lamont," the Colonel said soberly. "And I haven't said that we sent the ship. Merely that we would have made the same choices, in that situation. Recover the injector if possible, destroy it if necessary. We live in a dangerous Universe, and sometimes it's necessary to make hard choices to protect humanity. Even at the cost of three lives; Dr Heriot's talents will be sorely missed."_

_"I'd like to go home now," Alison said, her voice unsteady._

_The Colonel rose to his feet. "By all means. Of course, you won't mention this meeting to anybody else; the compulsion we've already implanted will take care of that." He tapped the exercise book. "I'm afraid we can't return this to you."_

_"I didn't think you would." Alison suffered herself to be led to the T-Mat. "Goodbye."_

_"Be seeing you," the Colonel replied._


	25. Epilogue

> Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,  
>  Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.  
>    —John Donne, _The Sun Rising_

_Lily Carson stared blindly out at the cold, unmoving stars. According to the ship's instruments, the_ Butterfly _was plunging out of orbit, at a speed high enough to make pursuit impossible. But the flight deck was the same calm, antiseptic area that it had been for the last sixteen days, with not so much as a flashing light or alarm to warn of inescapable doom._

_"That's it," Zoë said. Her voice wasn't so much calm as flat and dead._

_"It's what?" Captain Fergus asked her, politely._

_"We're past the point of no return. Our gravitational acceleration now exceeds the theoretical maximum of any spaceship currently in existence. Even if someone up there wanted to save us, they couldn't. We've got about twenty minutes and then we'll burn up in the outer layers of the atmosphere."_

_"You're taking this very calmly."_

_"Well, I'm trained to. How do you feel, Lily?"_

_"Does it matter?" Lily asked, still staring dully out of the viewport._

_Zoë put a hand on her arm. "It matters to me."_

_"I feel like there's another Lily somewhere, carrying on with her life as normal. And I'm just a bad copy that's going to be thrown away."_

_"I think you're in shock." Zoë turned back to Captain Fergus. "But you're not, are you?"_

_Captain Fergus shrugged. "I've seen a few things. Certain inescapable death... you get used to it, doing what I do."_

_"Really?"_

_"Have you got a better explanation?"_

_"I think you've got a plan. Some way you can survive what's going to happen to this ship."_

_"You said yourself that isn't possible."_

_"It wouldn't be the first time I'd been wrong," Zoë said quietly. "Would it, Doctor?"_

_The silence stretched out for what felt like a minute. Then Captain Fergus laughed._

_"There goes my big reveal!" she said. "When did you work it out?"_

_"I wasn't completely sure until just now," Zoë said. "But I was hoping. It was when we had that meeting at the Dogger-4 sea dome. You were behaving just like Alison's Ragged Man — turning up and offering a bargain. And then you believed me when I said we'd travelled in time. You wouldn't have believed that unless you knew me, or you were a time traveller yourself. And the only person I've met who matched all those criteria was the Doctor."_

_Captain Fergus — the Doctor — nodded. "Imagine my surprise when I got a call from someone I'd never heard of by the name of Kate Compline. I don't give out my number lightly. And then I got another surprise when she turned out to be you. Crossing your own timeline, no less. Well, what could I do but go along with you and enjoy the ride?"_

_"I felt it was the best way to ensure I didn't cause a paradox," Zoë said. "According to the Novikov self-consistency principle—"_

_"The Universe doesn't work like that," the Doctor broke in. "What actually happens is you can scribble all over history right up to the point that giant bats start flying out of the woodwork. Nice chap, Igor Novikov, but time travel's nothing like as tidy as he thought." She put her hands behind her head. "Anyway, we can't sit around chatting all day, because any minute now this ship's going to hit Neptune's atmosphere and burn up. Shall we make a move?"_

_"Where to?" Lily said dully. "There's nowhere."_

_"For now, I think the cargo bay. You'd better come with me. I've got one last conjuring trick you won't want to miss."_

_She unbuckled her seatbelt and climbed out of the pilot's seat. Zoë followed, leading the dazed Lily by the hand. The short walk to the cargo bay passed in tense silence._

_On arrival in the bay, the Doctor reached into an inside pocket and produced a small metal box, about five centimetres on a side, and a stubby black rod tipped with gold at one end and silver at the other._

_"One ordinary box," she said, holding it up. "And one magician's wand. No self-respecting conjurer should be without one. But perhaps you'd like to put another name to it?"_

_"It's your Time Vector Generator, isn't it?" Zoë said._

_"Got it in one. Now, we insert the one into the other, thus..."_

_She inserted the tip of the rod into the box, and pushed gently at it. Despite being over four times as long as the box was deep, the rod slid completely in, without the slightest complaint. The Doctor set the box on the floor, and took a pace back._

_"Zoë, I suggest you shut your eyes for this bit," she said. "I don't want your memory block flaring up."_

_"What memory block?" Zoë asked, obediently closing her eyes._

_"Don't worry, I'll sort that out for you this afternoon. Just a matter of the right sequence of stimuli. But watching this bit is definitely the wrong stimulus, right now."_

_The box on the floor was increasing rapidly in size, more so in the vertical direction than the other two. Its colour was deepening, too, from steel-grey to a dark blue._

_"Can you really get us out of here?" Lily asked, her eyes fixed on the transformation that was taking place._

_The Doctor smiled confidently. "Wherever you like."_

_"We can't go back to Earth," Zoë said. "Not in the next few decades, anyway. I'll end up in prison."_

_"Made your own planet too hot to hold you? I know the feeling."_

_The blue cuboid in front of them had by now reached full size, and was beginning to acquire its finer detail: the inset wooden panels, the small windows with frosted glass panes, the words POLICE PUBLIC CALL BOX around the rim._

_"I think she's about ready," the Doctor said, as the last few characters formed themselves over the doors. "You never gave me the chance to ask you this, last time. Zoë, would you like to travel with me?"_

_"Definitely," Zoë said, stepping eagerly forward. Since her eyes were still closed, she nearly collided with one of the door pillars, but recovered and disappeared into the interior of the TARDIS._

_"And you, Lily?" the Doctor went on._

_"I don't have a lot of choice, do I?"_

_"Oh, you do." The Doctor led her forward, into the roundel-studded console room. "Zoë, you can open your eyes now. Lily?" She snapped her fingers in front of Lily's face. "Can you hear me?"_

_"It's bigger..." Lily murmured._

_"On the inside," Zoë said. "We know."_

_Lily clutched her head. "I'm hallucinating."_

_"As I was saying," the Doctor said. "I could take you home right now... or we could stop off at a few other places on the way."_

_"You will come travelling with us, won't you?" Zoë asked, her face alive with enthusiasm._

_The word "Yes" was out of Lily's mouth before she knew it._

_"Then welcome aboard the TARDIS." The Doctor was at the console, and the grinding noise of the engines filled the air. "First stop: anywhere."_

_"We've really escaped, haven't we?" Zoë said, watching the scanner as the image of the crippled, disintegrating_ Butterfly _receded into the distance._

_"I thought it was the end for all of us," Lily said._

_"The end? Not a bit of it." The Doctor put a hand on each of her new companions' shoulders. "This is where it all begins."_


End file.
